


Shutting Down

by skyenapped



Category: Suits (TV)
Genre: Angst, Cocaine, Community: Suitsmeme, Cutting, Depression, Domestic Violence, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Dubious Consent, Emotional Abuse, Implied or Off-stage Rape/Non-con, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Power Imbalance, Prompt Fic, Self-Harm, Slash, Suicide, Suicide Attempt, Suits, Unhealthy Relationships, Verbal Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-08-14
Packaged: 2017-11-12 03:06:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 17
Words: 53,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/485983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skyenapped/pseuds/skyenapped
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harvey moved on and let go. Mike, on the other hand, didn't know how to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally a fill for a prompt from the Suitsmeme-
> 
> Original prompt was: _"Mike is in love with Harvey, but when he confesses it, Harvey rejects him and laughs it off. Mike is heart broken, and in a desperate attempt to numb out the heart ache, he starts abusing drugs. It lands him in therapy, and his depression starts to swallow his entire life. No one notices this because Mike keeps up an alright appearance, but eventually it's too much for him and he attempts suicide. Although Harvey can't return his feelings, he tries to help Mike as much as he can, Mike rejects his help thinking it's just pity. Mike ends up in a mental hospital, emotionally unstable and starts to lose touch with reality. Harvey witnesses Mike fall apart, and then Mike goes and succeeds in taking his own life."_
> 
> Eventually added it to ff.net and now since it is complete, figured I would also archive it here. Originally started on 8/10/11, finished 8/13/12.
> 
>  **BLANKET TRIGGER WARNING** for entire story, for: drug use, major character death, self-harm, suicide, dubcon/non-con, coercion, verbal/emotional abuse, language, excessive use of italics. THIS IS NOT A HAPPY STORY. 
> 
> *
> 
> As a final note, I want to say a few more things about this story. I didn't want to trigger anyone, which is the reason for all of the warnings. Instead, I wanted to paint a realistic picture of depression, self-harm, and suicide, and the comorbidity of a dysfunctional and abusive relationship. I think I've left it open to readers to decide which, if either, existed first, but I perhaps I made one more clear than the other - I am not certain. There may be details or terms that aren't necessarily accurate, but know that I, unfortunately, have personal experience with a lot of the subject matter in this, including depression, self-harm, and emotional abuse. So, in closing, I just hope that I did the prompt justice, and that I delivered the story without romanticism.   
> -s

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cover graphic (below) for this story created by the wonderful ellen_grieves (@ellengrieves).

*

 

Mike stared numbly ahead, from his seat, his hands folded in a weak pile on his lap. The chaos of the hospital at midnight didn't slow for anyone, least of all him, he decided, but in the moment, so raw and apathetic from recent events, all he really heard were muddled, distant voices of doctors and nurses and patients. And all he saw was a white, white wall.

At some point - and maybe an hour had passed, or a minute, he really didn't know, or care - he found enough energy to turn his head down to his wilted hands, and his bandaged wrists, and the pale, tortured skin peeking out from beneath them.

Another hour passed, or maybe a minute-time was fluid and really, Mike hadn't know what day it was, let alone the time, in, well, see, that was the problem. So when a doctor, a familiar one, one so accustomed by now to his weekly ER visits and his self-mutilation and routine but-just-barely-unsuccessful overdosing, was shining a pen light into his eyes and trying with fire, wind, and rain - so to speak, of course - to get his attention, well, Mike was already too far inside of his own head, and he was long, long gone.

 

*

 

 

_"I told you, Mike, I don't mix business with pleasure. "_

_"But-"_

_"But nothing! Now you have three cases and I'll be happy to give you another if that isn't enough work for that big brain of yours."_

_"But you said-"_

_"I'm a lawyer, Mike. I say a lot of things. I don't mean half of them. "_

 

_*_

_  
_

The doctor in front of him - thirty-five or so, give or take,  _Harvey's age,_ with light brown hair - was well-intentioned, but annoying. Mike swatted the penlight from his face and startled even himself with the movement. It required more energy than he thought he had - than he'd had in days, maybe weeks - and it snapped him out of his well-established shell of indifference.

"You want to talk now?" the doctor asked, and Mike should have taken him up on his innate compassion, on his time, because no one else seemed to have any. But he didn't.

"About as much as I want to jump out a plate-glass window," he said instead. He glared, but it was hardly threatening, and his eyes were gray now, not blue - no, not even close - and he just looked sick and lost.

Unfazed, the doctor sized him up, "So, you shouldn't be able to _stop_ talking, then."

If Mike had it in him, he might have laughed, caustically so, that fake kind he did when someone outsmarted him, or mocked him, but he didn't have it in him. He had nothing in him. Maybe pain, but really, where pain had been there was just emptiness now; a dark, black pit of despair and it was hollow and neither this doctor or this hospital, or the pills, or the bandages, or _talking_ , was going to touch it. And they certainly weren't going to heal it.

"I've never had occasion to stay any more than ten minutes with a patient in the ER on a day like this, on a Friday night, and you clearly don't remember me-" the doctor was saying. Mike stopped him mentally right there. He did remember him - his green eyes and his unyielding kindness and his nametag, what was it, _Alex Freeman, MD_ \- he remembered everything, whether he tried to or not. In fact, sometimes it was overwhelming. Either way, he wasn't going to bring it up. He was going to sit there in solemnity and let Alex finish, in the kind of breathless, concerned way he'd done the last time Mike encountered him in a triage bay: "...But I didn't take the Hippocratic Oath to leave a twenty-something sitting here alone looking like he'd be okay with the sun never rising again, so, please, Mike-Michael? Is there  _anyone_  I can call for you?"

Mike seemed unresponsive, avoiding eye contact with the same fervor he'd had to win a case, for Harvey, but he had heard the question, and names passed through his mind  _\- Trevor. No. Jenny. No. Harvey. Fuck no._

Finally he just shook his head, "There's no one," he said, his voice small. And if he wasn't already the most miserable sight, he curled forward even more, his underfed frame slouching, his hands finding the bony place between his knees. And Alex was fairly unequipped to handle the magnitude of the situation, so he slapped a file down on the bed, sighed and stared.

If Mike ever thought anyone would ask him anything, it would something along the lines of,  _Why did you do this?_ And maybe Alex had asked him that before, but, that was one thing he couldn't quite recall. It just seemed like the obvious first inquiry, after all, looking at Mike, everything that was wrong with him, at least on the outside, was self-inflicted. So it caught him off-guard when Alex actually said - and he  _said_  it, he didn't ask it, probably because he wasn't prepared to try and negotiate oil from a water faucet, which is what it was like to get answers from the kid -  _Who did this to you_ \- in a voice that seemed momentarily disgusted with humanity, and Mike just looked at the tile below him, and he couldn't bring himself to tell the truth, _Harvey,_  and  _he didn't hate him,_ after everything, he didn't hate him, and the last thing he was going to do was give anyone else a reason to.

 

*

 

_"I need to know if you're planning to go to Jessica about this-Because let me tell you something, Mike. If you go to her about this whole...situation, and you put my ass and my career on the line, I swear to God-"_

_"-This is the part where I like my person better than yours. See, I? I would never do that."_

_Harvey had huffed, "Good," he'd said finally. "Then we have an agreement."_

_Mike had left the office that night, adrenaline and anger in his veins, banging on Trevor's door like he didn't particularly care if it fell right off the hinges, or if they got into another fist-fight like before Montana. Maybe that would've actually hurt less._

_"You know, when I said I wasn't dealing, I really meant it, Mike."_

_"Yeah, I don't care," Mike had hissed. "I need something stronger."_

_"Stronger?" Trevor had raised his eyebrows. He'd known something was wrong with Mike, something besides the usual, and that Pearson-Hardman was probably the common denominator, but he was an enabler, and if leaving it alone got them together on the couch with lines of coke on the table, then Trevor was going to do just that - leave it alone._

_Mike had breathed, more than a little desperate, "Yeah, stronger."_

_"Like what?"_

_"I don't know, Trevor. What makes you forget?"_

 

_*  
  
_


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "No, Harvey. Compared to you, it doesn't hurt."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BLANKET TRIGGER WARNING for entire story, for: drug use, major character death, self-harm, suicide, dubcon/non-con, coercion, verbal/emotional abuse, language, excessive use of italics. THIS IS NOT A HAPPY STORY.

 

*

 

It wasn't like Mike went straight to Trevor and cocaine.

First he went to Harvey's, uninhibited by the heavy blur of alcohol. After the door slammed in his face, he went to a bar. And another one, and another, and before long he was stopping in for  _a drink_  every night after he left Pearson Hardman, and eventually  _a drink_  turned into  _another_ until he might as well have put the whole bottom shelf on his tab. Rachel asked him, frequently, in the morning when he walked in, head down and solemn, what was wrong and why he smelled less and less like cheap cologne and more like liquor. He was by nature quick on his feet, but with each excuse she seemed to become more skeptical.

"This is about Harvey," she said. "Isn't it?"

Mike shook his head in sharp defense, "No, actually, it isn't."  _Liar._

"Fine."

After the bars came the pot, but only for a week, because even in New York City it wasn't easy for a fake lawyer to find a reliable and affordable dealer and keep it all on the down-low, and Trevor was still in Montana. So he moved on to cigarettes, not because they were comparable by any means, of course, but because it was another unsavory habit and it seemed to at least help perpetuate all of the self-destruction he was sinking into.

The cutting was next, and it started by accident - a broken mirror, a splintered shard of glass - and it all began with a voicemail.

_Mike, I told you you to come over and get your shit. I can't have guests over when your skinny ties are still all over the fucking place._

He showed up at the door, and this time Harvey didn't close it. He stepped aside, and feeling defeated somewhere deep down in his stomach, Mike entered. He collected a small pile of clothes from the bedroom - a couple unfolded suits, wrinkled by a fifteen-hour day, and a t-shirt, and ties, and one sock - and then he threw them back on the floor and stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling window for a long, long time. When Harvey walked in, he was still there.

"I don't remember any of this being on the floor before I let you in," he said, motioning to articles of clothing. His voice was even, nonchalant, emotionless. That was probably what hit Mike hardest in the weeks surrounding everything, not particularly  _what_  Harvey said, but the  _way_ he said it; the way he didn't seem too particularly affected by having caused so much emotional devastation. Mike had seen him more upset over spilling coffee.

"I don't remember giving a shit."

Harvey grinned at the rebellion. After all, Mike always sounded more than a little nervous whenever he stood up to him. Of course, he was still staring ahead through the window, back turned symbolically, but he didn't need to be looking at Harvey to know he was standing there, nothing if not smug, holding a glass of some kind of top-shelf liquor that probably cost twice Mike's rent.

"Don't forget your toothbruth," Harvey said, ignoring Mike and his pained silence. He took a sip from his glass and then headed to the bedroom door, "I'm tired of looking at it every morning."

In those quiet few minutes, Mike had rifled up enough anguish inside to turn around and call out, "I don't need any of this  _shit,_ Harvey! Why did you call me here? Why didn't you just throw it away?" He stomped after him, but Harvey was already several paces ahead. Mike veered off into the bathroom, still shouting. "My fucking toothbrush!" he yelled, throwing a stainless steel container off of the sink. His heart was racing, and he felt completely out of control, but he couldn't stop. The container hit the tile with a reverberating beat, and he kicked it against the wall. "And a cheap suit! That's what you fucking called me over here for!"

Mike wanted him to rush in, to tell him to be quiet, to stop being dramatic, or to wrestle the towel rack - that he was tearing from the wall - from his hands. He wanted him to  _put down the fucking whiskey_ and console him, tell him it was okay, okay to be angry, or hurt, or broken, or pissed off. He wanted him to hold him, tight, so tight that he couldn't do any of this screaming or crying or throwing or breaking things.

Harvey knew he wanted this, so he stayed in the kitchen and re-filled his glass. And just listened. Listened to the crying, the whimpering, the cursing, the clanging of metal as Mike all but destroyed the vanity and everything around it, and finally, to the shattering of glass. It was movie-theatre loud, the kind of sound that makes you jump, like the backfire of a car, and it was followed by complete silence.

Harvey put down the fucking whiskey.

In the bathroom, Mike stared at his face in the spider-cracked mirror, having shocked himself to stillness. He didn't feel any pain, but blood ran down his fist and hit the porcelain in red, rapid splashes that seemed to convey all of the sad energy inside him. He picked up a stray piece of glass from next to the faucet and pressed it against his skin,  _and cut._  He felt it, but not the way he should have. He didn't feel it enough to cry out. He didn't feel it enough to  _stop._  He just felt it enough to realize that there were still other things he  _could_  feel, besides betrayed. Besides  _used._  Besides  _discarded._ He could feel the tearing of his skin and the burn of the glass next to his vein. And then he could feel Harvey's eyes on him from the doorway; brown, tired, piteous, mostly-disinterested eyes.

"Are you done?"

Mike stared for moment, and then snapped his head back and kept cutting, every slice more furious and more full of self-loathing than the last, "Nope."

Harvey only needed to take two large steps toward the sink to reach him; to grab his wrist and twist it until Mike had no choice but to drop the glass. "Yes. You are."

"Don't bother caring about me  _now,_ " Mike hissed.

Harvey shrugged, "I won't." He leaned over to pick up a towel that had fallen during the chaos and shoved it up against Mike's chest. "But you're bleeding all over my bathroom."

Mike didn't really know why the coldness still surprised him, or why it still hit him somewhere so sensitive, or why he was still even standing there in the first place and why he hadn't just walked out of the apartment and  _left_. It had only been a few months. Granted, they had felt much longer, but Mike had somehow gotten in too deep, too soon. Now instead of getting out, he was committing vandalism and literally carving himself a deeper hole and it was really just a matter of time until he wouldn't know which way was up.

Harvey had left the bathroom, but on a morbidly curious note, backtracked and peek his head around the corner. He motioned to Mike's wrist, and where it was resting against the counter as Mike gingerly pressed down on it with the towel he'd been given.

"Doesn't that hurt?' Harvey asked, flippant and rhetorical, like it was the dumbest, most pointless thing he'd ever seen anyone do, and if he possessed even the most remote sense of understanding, he hid it all too well.

Mike didn't answer at first. For several long seconds, he just stared down despondently as the blood turned part of the white towel to copper. Finally, and without looking up, he said, "No, Harvey. Compared to you, it doesn't hurt."

Harvey was already gone.

 

*

 

Cocaine was like cleaning the slate. It erased everything that happened with Harvey, the lies and the promises and the  _I love you_  and  _I say a lot of things_  and  _I don't mean half of them_  and _Who's Mike Ross? Oh, he's no one._ It wasn't a solution, but at least temporarily, he could just forget. He could sit there and look at the ceiling and then take the same razor he used to cut the powder and draw a deep line down his arm and bleed all over his jeans, then scrub off the dried blood, sleep off his high, cover up with a suit Harvey approved of, go to work, deal with Rachel's prying questions, and try not to look or act like a growing addict. By the third week on the drug, he almost had the routine down to a science. And no one at the firm seemed the wiser.

Except-

"Your nose is red again," Harvey observed from his desk.

Mike looked around in annoyed awe, "I'm trying to...talk to you about witness here."

"And I'm saying that you look like you've been snorting lines. Or you've had a bad cold for the last five years."

"What do you want from me, Harvey?" he asked, exasperated. "I'm still here, and I'm still doing my job, and  _I'm still good at it!_ I just got our last hope to testify for us. So don't worry about what I do when you're not around."

"Mike..." Harvey leaned forward in his seat, failing to stifle a small, sardonic laugh that went straight to Mike's heart. "I don't know what you're doing. The drugs, the cutting, the...I don't know. But you need to stop. You can't have honestly thought we would have worked, did you?"

Mike looked back for a while, then his eyes drifted down to the floor when it all became too uncomfortable. Harvey sighed.

"Go home," he ordered softly. "Take the rest of the day."

"No, no, no, I need to finish telling you about our witness and I need to go and talk to her so she doesn't change her mind!"

Harvey stood up, as though it might assert some new level of control and Mike might stop reacting and just leave, "And I said  _take the rest of the day,_ Mike!"

"Why?" Mike asked. "Why?" Clearly Harvey's plan had failed. The more time that had passed, the more bold Mike had become in his retaliation; the more he held his ground during their weekly - if not daily - discord. It was only a matter of time before Jessica's raised eyebrows escalated to a serious sit-down about their increasingly frequent - and seemingly very personal - disagreements. But now, with both of their voices raised, in an almost-shouting match on full display of the firm, it was safe to say they were, well, pushing their luck.

And Mike felt uncomfortably stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place of, ironically, not wanting to cause Harvey problems, and yet concurrently, wanting to do nothing but.

"You need to change your tone, Mike," Harvey warned, glancing worried through the glass and then back.

 _"Why?"_  Mike repeated, with a careless shrug. Everything had already gone to shit, so he saw no point in discretion. "What are you  _more_  concerned about, anyway? That I might show up to court coming off a coke high and lose the case or that I'm  _doing_  cocaine in the first place? Because sometimes I can't tell if you ever really gave a fuck about  _me_  or just about what I could _do for you!_ "

Harvey crossed the room in a minor panic, put his hands on Mike's shoulders and literally  _shhh_ 'd him. The room went silent and Harvey waited to see if anyone had noticed, or at least, if anyone that noticed intended on investigating. When neither Donna or Jessica or Louis appeared, he turned back to Mike and whispered.

"If you think that your little Harvard secret coming out will ruin your career, announcing to the entire firm that you're doing cocaine isn't gonna go over any better."

Harvey's face was so close that Mike didn't have much of a choice but to meet his stare and hold it.

"You can't treat me like this," he sniffed, and Harvey didn't really miss a beat.

"I can do whatever I want," he said, guiding Mike rather roughly toward the door. "Now I mean it,  _go home._ And I swear to God, if we lose tomorrow because you went to Trevor's instead," Harvey's voice shook with preemptive anger. "...I'll treat you a lot worse."

And it may have been garden variety apathy - knowing the full extent of the situation and just not caring - but for someone who made a living learning to read people, well, Harvey wasn't even  _close_ to knowing what Mike was going through.

 

*

 

So it was Harvey, and then it was drinking and pot, and then it was cutting and Trevor and cocaine. And then it was Alex Freeman and an emergency room triage bay and if the status quo wasn't bad enough already, it pretty much went downhill from there.

 

*

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BLANKET TRIGGER WARNING for entire story, for: drug use, major character death, self-harm, suicide, dubcon/non-con, coercion, verbal/emotional abuse, language, excessive use of italics. 
> 
> *

 

*

 

Mike wasn't instantly starstruck by Harvey, but whatever comes after instantly, it was that. Maybe a day, or three, or a week, or two - no, definitely no more than a week. It really should have been only a crush, in fact, that's really all it started as. Student-teacheresque in some ways, and like Louis had said, Mike was starving for a mentor. Louis didn't get too many things right outside of legal pit maneuvers, but he'd hit the nail on the head with that one. Plus, it helped that Mike was so eager, so  _desperate to change,_ and as a twenty-something with unresolved daddy issues who had been railroaded by academic suspension and pot, well, it seemed almost cruel that fate would have him introduced to Harvey, of all people.

Harvey was the kind of person Mike wanted to be around, but didn't quite want to  _be._  There was something about him that was just one too many levels removed from  _completely human_ that unnerved Mike just enough to remember that there was a fine line between becoming a lawyer and staying a good person. It wasn't really anything he held against Harvey, after all, he still was at his beck and call and the desire to please him and do everything he was told, when he was told, to the absolute top of his skill level, rapidly turned from  _desire_  to  _need._  Raw, insatiable need to please someone who wasn't just difficult to please, but next to impossible.  _Need_ to avoid disappointment at all sacrifice, including sleep and food and other prior forms of socialization.

When Harvey actually recognized his struggles and his victories and his hard work, Mike felt as though he'd just fought a losing battle - and won.  _The Unwinnable War Against (or for?) Harvey Specter._  He probably should have backed off of the late nights, the obsessing, the Red Bull, the  _need,_ since addressing Mike's efforts had been Harvey's unspoken, unemotional way of trying to look out for the kid's wellbeing, but instead, Mike just dove into each case with even more fervor and focus than before.

Harvey tried to ignore his new associate and his blue eyes and good looks and the way he hung on his every word. For a while, he did and without too much inconvenience. But the more time that went on, the more Harvey cracked; the more he became surprisingly poor at coping with that degree of temptation.

"Tsk, tsk," Louis said one day, as the first month drew to a close. He strode up beside Harvey, who was standing stoic sipping coffee, and followed his gaze to Mike who was typing away furiously in his cubicle. Louis tilted his head left, then right in sassy tune with his words. He had the slimy tone of a phone-sex operator and Harvey took his eyes off Mike to glance in lazy disgust at his colleague. Louis just smiled, bobbed his head again, and finished. "It must be nice, right? I mean, look at him. He'd ride his bike into rush hour traffic if it meant winning your cases. My associates just wish  _I_ would do that. I see it in their eyes, Harvey. I see it."

Harvey smirked, but kept his stare straight ahead. "That's because you're a dick."

"Whatever," Louis said, in that quick, zippy way. "So, how much do you want for him?"

"Excuse me?"

"The kid. I'll give you five thousand. And I'll throw in Norma."

Harvey snorted, "You want me to  _sell_ you my associate for fifteen minutes worth of pay-and a secretary?"

He shrugged and nodded, "Yeah, that's... basically what I'm saying."

"No dice, Louis."

"Oh come on, Harvey," he motioned a hand toward Mike, who remained in determined posture and seemed entirely unaware of his audience. "You two are over here everyday re-writing Lolita and I'm like, stuck with Harold. He's the Harvard equivalent of, I don't know, an  _idiot?_ "

"I'd say we don't hire idiots," Harvey said. "But that would be inaccurate on the grounds that Jessica hired you."

Louis ignored the insult and Harvey looked amused with himself, adding, "See that's funny because-"

"I just need him for like, a day," Louis snapped, cuttng him off. He tapped his fingers impatient. "Til I get caught up on a few hundred briefs."

"No."

"Harvey-"

"I'm not  _giving_  or  _selling_ you Mike."

With a childish huff, Louis stalked off as if their conversation had never taken place.

 

*

 

Harvey ran two knuckles over Mike's face, slowly extending his fingers until he was drawing an invisible mark on his cheek and forehead. Without looking up, he said, his voice hard and observant, "He's cold."

Behind him, Alex Freeman sighed, "Yeah," he began, matter-of-fact, maybe even verging on sarcastic. "That tends to happen."

In any other situation, Harvey might have retorted with something equally passive aggressive - because Alex's words were thinly veiled: he didn't like Harvey and he made a weak effort to hide his contempt - but this wasn't exactly any other situation. So Harvey just took it.

Until he couldn't, of course. Until his ego took over. The only problem was that he was trying to match wits with a doctor, not a client.

His courtoom had just become a hospital room, and he was painfully out of his comfort zone.

"When will he wake up?"

"I don't know," Alex replied sharply, busying himself with a chart.

Harvey took his fingers off of Mike's face, turned around, and sneered. "I suppose I should go and find a doctor who can tell me."

Alex didn't look offended, or even significantly fazed. Somewhat rattled by Harvey's general presence, maybe, or just by his dislike of the man, but not offended. "I can tell you this, Mr. Specter. He overdosed. Again. His tox screen is off the charts. We're moving him to the ICU in ten minutes, and no, I don't know when or if he'll wake up," Alex shook his head with the same grievance for the human race he'd developed since learning of Harvey's existence. He walked toward the door, throwing subdued but angry words over his shoulder as he left, "And any other doctor you find will tell you the same God damned thing."

Harvey stood, slightly slack-jawed. He wasn't used to being spoken to like that, but more importantly, during the occasions someone did venture to take such a risk, Harvey most certainly made sure he at least had the last word. But if this had been a trial, well, Harvey just lost.

Looking resigned, he turned back to Mike. This time he didn't dare touch him. His skin was too cold; too pale. So instead, he just looked. Looked at his frail body, his dehydrated skin and his sharp, hungry jawline. Mike had always been skinny, but Harvey tried to remember when exactly he'd become this  _emaciated._  He couldn't recall. Try as he did, he couldn't sort out a particular date in his head when things had progressed from bad to horrible; it all just melded together in a blur of cases, clients, and arguments.  _He'd been busy,_ he justified. He moved on, eyes trailing over the hospital bed, down toward weak arms and the thick, violent scars spanning from the wrists to the elbows where Mike had all but tried to split himself open.

Finally, there was the particularly disturbing part where the only life left in Mike at all seemed to be the artificial rise and fall of his chest - to the rhythmic beep of a machine - as a tube forced air into his lungs with an angry  _hssssss_ that Harvey took personally.

 

*

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BLANKET TRIGGER WARNING for entire story, for: drug use, major character death, self-harm, suicide, dubcon/non-con, coercion, verbal/emotional abuse, language, excessive use of italics.
> 
> *

*

A month in, Harvey was caving.

He probably only dealt with this so well because he was fairly accustomed to taking such massively undercalculated risks. Like when he got Travis Tanner to up his settlement offer by bluffing alone, and he had absolutely no back up plan. Mike was a significant risk because, aside from the obvious ramificiations of sleeping with an associate -  _a twenty-something, no less_ \- he could throw Harvey under the bus if things ended less than favorably. The fallout for Harvey would be monumental.

But Harvey decided to take the leap, understanding the potential consequences yet feeling pretty confident that Mike was so desperately wrapped around his finger that he could probably kick him in the ribs and he would come crawling back, bruised and apologetic. It was likely that same mindset that set their entire relationship up to be cruelly one-sided and of course, ultimately, for failure: Harvey called all the shots, and Mike obeyed him blindly because somewhere along the line he'd come to the conclusion that any kind of attention from Harvey was better than no attention from Harvey.

They're relationship - for lack of a less charitable title - was dependent, innappropriate, unfair, and  _dysfunctional_ didn't even begin to cover it.

No one at Pearson Hardman seemed the wiser. Not for a while, at least. After all, Mike was good at keeping his initial unrest from being too obvious. And sometimes he wasn't exactly too upset with the situation, because some days he woke up and reminded himself that Harvey Specter didn't have emotions - at least none he recognized - and that regular screws and the occasional  _Good boy_ was the best he was probably ever going to get from the man. Of course, other days he woke up - usually on the left side of Harvey's bed - and his heart hurt in the most literal way and he wondered if there was even the remote potential to be mean more to Harvey than waiting coffee or post-office stress relief. The odds weren't in Mike's favor.

Hindsight, supposedly, is twenty-twenty. Or at least better than whatever vision Mike was looking at Harvey with before they started sleeping together. So it would seem like things would have never gotten quite so out of control if either of them had called the whole thing off before Mike got hurt. And maybe he wouldn't have fallen quite so hard, or so far, had things gone on for less time. But the truth was that Mike was already in too deep and probably wouldn't have known any better unless he was older and wiser. Which isn't to say he was entirely helpless, of course, but he was  _impressionable_ and that was the only trait Harvey had needed to see in him. Besides, at the end of the day, Mike's career was on an already-thin thread that Harvey hung over his head just frequently enough to remind him there was really no getting out until he said so. Finally, whether or not Mike's obedience was because of his fire-like desperation to get Harvey to requit his feelings, or if he just told himself that in order to feel like he actually had a choice in the matter - some kind of control within their relationship - didn't particularly matter since it all led to the same place in the end anyway. Which was, more often than not, the hospital.

Harvey managed to keep things impressively professional in the office, at least for a while, which is likely why they warded off Jessica's suspicion for so long. At the very least, all of their arguments had yet to bleed over into the firm. Mike still worked fervently on cases as he always had. He still caught shit from Louis and Harvey came to his defense every now and then, if it was convenient. Sometimes he let him fend for himself. And Mike still sat beside him while he closed deals and every time, Harvey did something - flawless speech, legal fireworks - to reaffirm Mike's enamor. It almost always preceded Harvey sitting down next to him, with a smug, satisified grin, glancing at Mike with just enough pride to make his stomach do backflips, but with so little emotion it was as if he hadn't spent the prior night with his arm around his chest and his hand in his hair, or like he had no intention of ever doing it again. Like Mike was merely a subset of his life, and such a small compartment at that, that Mike couldn't even see the slightest hint of it in his eyes. If he ever meant anything at all, Harvey was generally incapable of showing it.

What was probably hardest for him to cope with as the time progressed was the idea that he so desperately wanted Harvey to be indelibly, inherently  _good,_  the way he'd been so convinced he was, somewhere inside, where he thought for sure he stored his emotions, and his love of things besides  _money_  and  _winning_ , but he just  _wasn't._  He  _wasn't_  as good of a person as Mike wanted him to be, and every time Harvey used him, Mike thought up justification after justification until he, inevitably, ran out. It wasn't a character flaw that Mike had any intention of holding against Harvey; he'd made peace with the fact that Harvey wasn't entirely humane, but he'd been somewhat railroaded by the realization that he wasn't even particuarly  _decent._  Still, had Harvey showed even the faintest sign of reacting to or simply acknowledging any of Mike's countless attempts to appeal to what existing humanity he  _did_ have, Mike would have waited.

Probably forever.

 

*

 

It was Mike's soul-crushing guilt of letting Harvey down, even though it had been on an almost imposible-to-win case, that gave Harvey the opportunity and the green light to act.

"I don't want you to be mad."

"I'm not mad," Harvey said.

"You're disappointed."

"It was a tough case, Mike. You did your best. Let it go."

"I don't want you to replace me."

When Harvey sighed, his disappointment was ill-concealed. "I wouldn't worry. New York City isn't exactly teeming with duplicates of Mike Ross."

Mike paced a few times, obviously worried about his potentially decreasing value, "I lost a witness, and I blew the mock trial, and now this- I promise, it won't happen again."

"I know." Harvey told him quietly, and, seeing the look on Mike's face, continued, "Look, if you really want to make it up to me - to the firm -"

"I'll do  _anything,_ " Mike said quickly; eager.  _Too eager._  Harvey looked at his associate - standing in front of him, frazzled, vulnerable, completely desperate and  _literally begging_ for another chance - and his mind went haywire. His discretion - what little he had - evaporated.

"I was saying, if you really want to make it up to the firm, you can finish the McKessen files. Before Thursday."

"Before Thursday? Harvey, there's like twenty-five  _boxes._ "

"And?"

Mike shook his head, "Nothing. I'm on it."

 

*

 

Not that Harvey had really planned so far ahead, but once Mike was up to his neck in paperwork and highlighters and Red Bull and had only two days left before the deadline, it was remarkably easy to convince him to bring the work to his place to finish. It may have been the part where Harvey very subtly promised him some help, or when he told him not to still be at work looking like crap - with files sprawled all over the office - when they opened in the morning, or the part where he didn't exactly  _ask_ him at all - but whatever it was, it worked.

"You were never actually gonna help me, were you?" Mike asked, a couple hours later, after the papers took over the better part of Harvey's living room.

Harvey just grinned and shrugged. Mike laughed and shook his head, because he'd expected as much. He hardly took his eyes off of the work, but he could feel Harvey watching him, watching his hands as they shuffled paper, as he highlighted mistakes, as he jotted down notes, crossed and uncrossed his legs, and slipped the pen between his teeth in concentration. At some point, Harvey disappeared on to the deck, talking on the phone and taking off parts of his ridiculously over-layered suit. Mike glanced up occasionally to look at him through the glass, and to listen to his voice as he spoke inaudibly, but he always turned his head just in time to avoid being caught. Mike was much more sly about staring than Harvey, at least, he tried.

The revelation took place after Harvey finished up his phone conversation, stepped back inside, and said, "You should take a break, Mike."

"No," Mike replied, not looking up. "I'm almost done. I need to finish."

"Mike," Harvey sighed. "It's midnight. Call it a day."

Mike shook his head furiously, trying to pick up his pace. "If I can just-"

Harvey walked closer, sidestepping around the stacks of paper, and motioned upwards with his hand, "Stand up," he said.

Mike hesitated, but only briefly, since it sounded a lot more like an order and less like a suggestion. He got to his feet quickly, rising to meet Harvey. He scanned over his face, trying desperately to concentrate on any part of it besides his eyes. He licked his lips nervously. The tension was thick, the way it always was when Harvey made eye contact, and Mike thought it might just suffocate him entirely this time. He squirmed under Harvey's intense stare, feeling like he could see right through him into his soul. The defining difference between this moment and ones from the past was that they weren't in the office or anywhere else surrounded by people that might otherwise inhibit their actions. They were alone.

Finally, after an excruiatingly painful thirty seconds, Mike gasped,  _"Harvey..."_ when he thought he might finally succumb to the silence or his climbing heart rate.

"Mike," Harvey interrupted. "You can't keep doing this."

Mike glanced up to ask 'what', without actually opening his mouth. Harvey nodded toward the pile of papers on the floor, and just that fleeting second of redirecting his sight gave Mike a chance to breathe again.

"This," Harvey explained. "You can't keep martyring yourself for me at all costs. That's not what I hired you for."

Mike looked down at the carpet and Harvey felt momentarily bad. "Look," he continued. "If you're not sleeping or eating or taking care of yourself, then you're not gonna be any good to me."

"Yeah but you told me to-"

"I told you to do the briefs before Thursday. I didn't say kill yourself in the process."

"I just need-"

"What do you need, Mike?" Harvey stepped closer, which was about as close as he could get without completely closing their gap. Mike froze.

"...I need...umm...I need...to..." Mike struggled, not for the right words, but for any words at all. "Need...to work, so you're...so you'll be happy. So I won't...disappoint you. And then...then you'll keep me. If you keep me...then I matter. I'll matter to you. I need to matter to you."

Harvey smiled, "You matter, Mike."

Mike nodded, but he wasn't all that convinced.  _Hopeful, but skeptical._

"What do you  _want?_ " Harvey asked, reaching out to run three fingers over Mike's temple and down his jaw.

What Mike wanted to say was  _approval, acceptance, love_  but he settled for a timid and quiet, "You" and just  _hoped_ that Harvey might turn out to be all of those things.

"I can't hear you."

 _"You,"_ Mike repeated, and Harvey grinned and tilted his chin up, kissing him until he whimpered.

After that night, Mike was putty in his hands.

 

*

 

Mike was only naive, only defenseless, only terrified, only  _desperate_ when it came to Harvey. Otherwise, he walked around the firm fairly confidently. He continually kicked ass in court and routinely stood up to Louis when the other associates hid behind their cublicles as if they were some kind of bomb shelter and Louis Litt was a war grenade. In Harvey's presence, he reigned in most of his feelings and dealt with the situation with impressive grace. Of course, the more time that passed the more he began to realize that Harvey wasn't exactly enlisting him to be anything other than a friend with benefits, and Mike hesitated to use that term since sometimes it didn't feel like Harvey was even his friend. It was all very up and down; a sort of predictable unpredictability in the sense that Mike knew Harvey wasn't requitting any emotions, but wasn't sure what exact level of coldness he'd receive on any given day. And, sometimes, Harvey wasn't even particularly cold. Sometimes he was just Harvey, the one Mike knew before they ever started whatever it was they'd started, the one who bossed him around in an authoritative yet playful way, the one who stopped to give him genuine advice, to tease him and make pop culture references, the one Mike had fallen in love with before he'd become so completely caught up in him that he couldn't quite function without stopping to make sure he he had his complete approval, something that was, of course, close to unattainable.

Even at his worst, when Harvey was debateably cruel, he still wasn't quite  _sadistic._  After all, he still defended Mike against Jessica's harsh evaluations of his legal performance, and frequently took the fall for the rookie's (albeit rare) mistakes. One might say that Harvey never set out to hurt Mike, but didn't particularly try not to either. And when Harvey became so overbearing Mike couldn't quite keep up - mentally or physically - when he stopped being  _protective_  and just got downright  _possessive,_  when he no longer really  _asked_  Mike over as much as he  _told him he was coming over,_  when Mike knew he loved him but knew Harvey didn't love him back, and when Mike  _wanted_  to be with him but sat in his cubicle feeling a growing unease in his stomach - like things weren't  _entirely_  consenual anymore - even after that, after things reached a new level of questionable and convoluted - well, Harvey still wasn't exactly quick to back out; to call it all off. To  _just stop._

Which, despite the damage already done, was probably the most devastating inaction of all.

 

*

 


	5. Chapter 5

 

 

*

 

There was a time that Mike almost got out. Almost got out with a normal startle response and what little remained of his shredded self-worth. But it was a big  _almost._  Harvey was more than ready to be done with him and the nervous, jumpy, emotionally wounded mess that he'd become, that  _he'd made him,_ but, of course, only on his terms. The idea of Mike making the decision wasn't acceptable, and that was something he learned a little too late.

"You said if I wanted it to stop-"

Harvey turned around from his place by the door and explained, "I was talking about your  _career,_ Mike."

"And I'm talking about  _this!_ " Mike motioned between the two of them, covered his trembling mouth with his hand and turned his back so he could at least pretend to be looking out the window as people shuffled by the office door.

"Jesus Christ," Harvey sighed, lowering his eyes and glancing around. The more worked up Mike became, the louder he became, the higher the chance of someone parading into the room to see what all of the commotion was about. It didn't do much good, at least not anymore, for Harvey to tell him to be quiet, or to lower his voice, because Mike usually did, and when he didn't, well, he really didn't have a whole lot of control over it. He spoke as calmly as possible, fought down all of his pain and his anger until Harvey said something and he just  _snapped._ Even then his voice hadn't quite gotten to the point of being steady or reliable. Often his shouting didn't exactly come out as shouting as much as it did a weak, shakey cry and Mike usually trailed off after that.

Harvey was in a tough position, since there was really little he could do to wash his hands of Mike entirely. He intended to end things much sooner. After the first night, in fact, but he got more attached than he'd planned. Not as attached as Mike had gotten, of course, but attached enough that he'd dragged things on this long and was suddenly standing in his office, plotting a way to keep Mike under his thumb for several more days until he figured out how to let him down easy, if that was even still a possibility. Now, Mike was damaged goods and Harvey recognized that it was mostly because of him, but regardless, the kid was exhausting.

There was no easy fix. If he agreed to Mike's request, he might run to Jessica. If he didn't, he'd obviously make him worse. And if he called things off in a few days, well, he had a feeling Mike wouldn't just bounce back. And forget firing him. Harvey couldn't do that either, because if anyone found out about Mike's past, Harvey would go down for it just as quickly. And besides, as tiring, and as much of a liability as Mike was, Harvey still got off on the control, on telling him what to do and knowing he'd listen, on taking him home at night, on dictating what he did and when, on watching him squirm, on seeing him so desperate to do everything right for him, and basically on the sheer idea that someone loved him so much that they tolerated that level of manipulation in the first place.

Mike didn't really know what was worse - walking away, or staying with Harvey under those conditions, but at that moment he was ready to go with the former. Staying just hurt too much, and nothing he did was ever really enough, and Harvey always had less praise and more criticism, and was developing a disturbingly deaf ear for the word  _no._  Frankly, Mike was still in love - very much so - but he was also increasingly terrified. He felt like he walked around at work all day, screaming inside, and no one could hear him. Rachel continued to flirt as though he was actually on the market; as if Harvey wouldn't chase her off with a stick if she made a move, and Louis frequently dragged him into his office to regale (and disturb) him with tennis victories or sexual escapades, but usually their conversations ended abruptly when Mike pretended to hear his name and made a break for it, or if Harvey happened to pass by and quite literally pull Mike from Louis's proverbial grip as he told him not to move in on  _his associate._

"Harvey keeps you on a tight leash," Louis told him one day, leaning over rather offensively into Mike's cubicle.

"Uhh, what?" Mike tried hard not to look up from his typing.

"I don't keep my ponies on leashes, Mike," Louis continued. "I prefer to let them...graze, if you will. Freedom. It breeds productivity."

Mike frowned, opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted by Harvey's voice as he strided up. His stomach flooded with butterflies, which was fairly typical. Louis swore he saw him flinch.

"Louis, what did I tell you?" Louis rolled his eyes and smirked, "Come on Harvey, I'm just talking to the kid. You know you don't  _actually_ own him, right?"

Harvey looked down at Mike, who quickly put his chin on his fist and looked down at his desk.

"Of course I do," he replied confidently. "There's an ownership clause in his hiring paperwork. Jessica signed off on it."

Louis ignored him, turned to Mike and said, "Freedom," with a creepy nod, and then left.

Situations like that were routine, and no one ever really thought Harvey was being serious. Everyone took his sarcasm at facevalue, and sometimes Mike didn't think anyone would even believe him at all. The fact that he wound up standing in Harvey's office, crying quietly by the window, while everyone carried on with their day outside the glass doors behind him, wasn't doing much to convince him otherwise.

"Is that what you really want, Mike?" Harvey asked, in a quiet voice behind him, much closer than he was before. "You want it to stop? You want it all to go away?"

Mike shook his head in frustration, sniffling again. "I don't know," he said, but it came out less like a statement and more like a choked, uncertain sob. He did want it to stop. He didn't. He did. He didn't. He didn't know. He wanted things to be idealistic. He wanted Harvey to love him back. He wanted him to treat him less like an indentured servant and more like a person. But, in lieu of Harvey actually changing, then, Mike figured,  _yes,_ maybe it would hurt less if it stopped. If it all went away. But he could hardly make the decision, let alone commit to it.

"You can't make up your goddamn mind, Mike," Harvey snapped. He paced to the desk, and then back. Annoyed by Mike's lack of response, he gripped his shoulder and spun him around, his eyes meeting Mike's red, watery ones for the first time since Mike had shouted. "So I'll make it for you, okay?  _No. No_ , you don't get to walk in here and tell me it stops. I decide that. Now get your ass back to work. I want all the case files on my desk before you leave. And  _when_ you leave, you go straight to my place. You don't pass go, you don't collect two hundred dollars."

"Harvey, please," Mike begged, looking up. "...I'm tapping out."

 

* * *

 

The night before Harvey called the whole thing off - entirely too late, of course - they lied in his bed, one part conflicted colleagues, one part total strangers, one part something completely undefinable. Mike fell asleep first, feeling contradictively safe and vulnerable all at the same time, while Harvey tossed and turned and agonized over the situation for roughly only the second or third time since it all began. He didn't anticipate such complications, at least, not the kind he wasn't able to quickly smooth over with some sort of tactic he'd learned at Harvard. Most of his concern lied with how the whole thing might reflect him should it ever come to the attention of the firm, but it should be noted that somewhere in all of the self-absorption, there was at least a fleeting concern for Mike. Of course, he never mentioned it and Mike continued to question the existence of his conscience and whether or not  _Harvey Specter_  and  _a soul_ were in fact mutually exclusive.

Though it evoked new damages and emotions, like  _discarded,_  when Harvey told him, the next day,  _We're done,_ Mike was nothing if not a little relieved. At first, anyway. Harvey had given him an out, which is what he thought he wanted. A chance to bolt to his own apartment after work and exhale without caving to sex as a means of keeping Harvey around, since outside of work that seemed to be all he wanted from him. He still walked on eggshells at the firm, to some degree, still felt an inexplicable need to meet Harvey's every demand and continually self-deprecate when he fell short. For several days, things were a less intense version of what they had been, and Mike felt marginally more relaxed. He was less nervous. He was less stressed, even if only slightly. He stopped flinching. He also watched Harvey intently, from a distance, to see if there was any remote sign that he might regret the decision to cut him loose, or if he'd been losing any sleep now that Mike was no longer tucked under his arm at night. But for all the occasions Mike had to witness Harvey's demeanor without him actually knowing, there was little evidence that anything was affecting him at all. In fact, Harvey seemed the same with or without Mike, as though he'd never made a significant impression on him - or any impression at all - and that was probably the push that vaulted Mike into chaos.

It started when he realized that Harvey never intervened during one of his and Rachel's extended conversations, or the way he stopped dragging him away from Louis every chance he got. When Harvey stopped calling him on the phone when he couldn't find him, stopped leaving him voicemails, stopped doing anything except the original casual orders about lawyer things. Suddenly Mike felt like he wasn't just  _unimportant,_  but verging on  _invisible._ Of course, Harvey still held a taut, unforgiving reign, still kept fairly rigid tabs on him, still barked instruction, still treated him like both a pain and a prodigy, but to Mike, it wasn't the same. His value seemed to be fading. Harvey was putting him on the backburner in favor of more clients and, Mike was certain, beautiful women. Harvey's infatuation with the idea of someone like Mike had dissolved.

He moved on and let go.

Mike, on the other hand, didn't know how to.

* * *

 

The first time Mike overdosed - not unintentionally, though less intentionally than the incidents that followed - was on sleeping pills, whiskey, and a Tuesday. It started off as a brilliant way of coaxing the sleep that he was so seriously lacking - between working for Harvey, doing remedial favors for Louis, and assuming the role of multiple associates - and ended as an even better way to avoid having to do either ever again. Not that Mike didn't love being a,  _ahem,_ lawyer, but he was being stretched thin, could have done without Louis ever saying "Good morning, Mike," again, and, most of all, wasn't sure how much longer he could stand to work under Harvey given all of the history. It got more painful every day.

Tuesday saw Harvey closing a deal with a particularly high-end client in a particularly high-end restaurant when his cell phone rang.

_Mike, whatever it is, it better be life or death because I'm in the middle of-_

_-Mr. Specter? This is Trevor._

Harvey's instincts told him something was wrong long before Trevor worked up the courage to.

That was the last time Harvey and Trevor ever saw or spoke to each other.

_Every goddamn time something bad happens to him, you seem to be involved._

_I could say the same for you._

On the other hand, it was the first time Harvey and Alex met.

_Harvey Specter._

Alex Freeman.

Is he okay?

_He tried to kill himself, Mr. Specter. Do have any idea why he'd do that?_

No.

 

*

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BLANKET TRIGGER WARNING for entire story, for: drug use, major character death, self-harm, suicide, dubcon/non-con, coercion, verbal/emotional abuse, language, excessive use of italics.

*

 

Though it contradicted the actions that followed, there was a time, closer to the beginning, when Harvey was remarkably and maybe even uncharacteristically warm, open, caring - all of the things Mike had hoped for and was temporarily convinced of. Case in point, a Wednesday night, an arm around Mike's shoulder, nestled up to Harvey's chest while he looked over the facts of the case they were working on. He scanned the papers as Harvey shuffled them in his hands while mumbling legal jargon and potential outcomes, most of the latter being  _winning._

Usually, Harvey had a thing about not taking work home with him, but this particular case was important - to him, to Jessica, to the firm in general - so he figured that lying in bed and spending an hour on it, with Mike curled up against him, wouldn't exactly kill him. Besides, the kid practically had an entire law school inside his head and retained every single thing he'd seen or heard that applied to the case, so Harvey bounced ideas off him, used his mind the same way he used him in general as the weeks went on.

"I need the profits for the first company again."

"Monthly or annual?"

"Annual."

"One hundred sixty four thousand, three hundred eighty seven."

"Very good," Harvey said, much the same way he'd said  _Good boy,_ and made a note of the amount on his paper.

Mike broke into an accomplished smile, slid up as close as he could, desperate to hold on to the moment, to the night, to the demeanor Harvey had - not because he necessarily  _knew_  it wouldn't last, but because he  _suspected_ it might not. The only thing he wasn't prepared for was how incapable of accepting that idea he would become.

By the time Harvey put the files away, turned off the light, and rolled over, it was pushing one in the morning, no longer Wednesday - technically - and his hand had migrated from Mike's shoulder to his head, sweeping blonde hair back over and over and over. Even in the recently-dimmed room, it was no challenge to make out his eyes, blue and young and promising and loyal and devoted and a million other things Harvey loved but didn't actually  _love_ , at least, not the way he loved his job and his money and his cars and his women.

"Absolutely brilliant," he mused, to which Mike ducked away from his hand and shook his head shyly.

"No."

"Yes," Harvey confirmed, and pulled him up against him tight, almost in an effort to protect him; to preserve his youth and his brilliance and how full of potential he was, not yet realizing - or caring - that he was doing an increasingly poor job of either one.

 

*

 

The fact that anyone had ever referred to Mike as  _brilliant_ was an ironic idea as he lied only recently un-comatose in a hospital bed in the ICU, able to speak in only partial child-like sentences, at a loss for recognizing colors, let alone faces, retaining nothing in his head except the sensation of radiating pain. It was like someone had taken a Van Gogh, left in in the rain and then set it on fire. Mike Ross was gone.

Except, he was still there, in some ways, of course. Still there in the sense that someone who resembled a sicker, paler, thinner version of him was sunken into the bed and blending in with white sheets. There in the sense that when Harvey walked in his eyes darkened ever so slightly from death-grey to half-alive-navy as if something about the man was familiar enough to stir up some kind of emotion inside him. It was all very fleeting. Mike slipped in and out of consciousness, rocked back and forth on the edge of lucidity and confusion, went long, agonizing days before giving doctors any signs that he might return to his normal level of functioning.

"Jessica wanted me to let you know that you still have a place at the firm," Harvey told him one night, very slight hint of guilt and responsibility in his voice. "When you're better."

Mike just stared hollowly at him from the bed, trying to figure out why his words were so difficult to process, why they sounded so foreign and distant and overwhelming and why he was still even there to hear him to begin with. Finally he managed a weak, exhausting, "Good," and fell asleep.

 

* * *

 

 

While Mike recovered, at least, to whatever level of recovery he was going to be able to reach, Harvey walked around at work dodging dagger eyes and curious stares whenever someone mentioned  _Mike Ross_ or when the associates formed circles of hushed whispers that all seemed to fall silent when he Harvey passed by. Even Donna watched him with a raised eyebrow as if he might do or say something that would give anyone at the firm a clue as to when or if Mike was coming back, or maybe some insight on exactly why he'd left to begin with. Everyone had meager pieces, but no one had the whole story.

Of all people, the only one brave enough - or maybe reckless enough - to actually approach Harvey, was-

"Kyle? Shouldn't you be somewhere else, like scrubbing the floor for Louis? Shining his shoes?"

Kyle laughed derisively, handsome face ruined by the level of douchebag he seemed to operate at, though it was worth mentioning that he actually gave Harvey a run for his money when it came to comebacks.

"I did that already. He said I did such a terrible job, he sent me to talk to you as punishment."

Harvey just smirked, fazed but unwilling to show it.

"So," Kyle continued. "What do I get first? A case I can't win no matter what I do? Unrealistic deadlines?" He followed Harvey as he walked toward the window, keeping a half-decent, half-safe distance, but continuing to press until it hurt. "Maybe you could make me sit here and watch me writhe while you fire my double?"

The last line hit Harvey enough to warrant a sharp look over his shoulder.

"That's right, I know about the Harvard thing. Can't see why you would really care, though, unless you're just worried about going down too."

"Get out," Harvey said, tone low and deadly.

Kyle wasn't rattled like the other associates, wasn't as intimidated as Louis, wasn't as cautious as Rachel and Donna, was forging full-speed ahead to find out what really happened. "Come on, I'm just trying to help," he said, his sarcasm thinly veiled. "Maybe you have three weeks worth of briefs for me to look over in one hour? Or would it be easier if you just fucked me into submission?"

Harvey's heartrate jumped, anger rose, jaw set, and he turned around and pointed to the door, "Get. Out."

Kyle stood his ground.

"You don't even  _like_  him," Harvey said, tossing up his hands in confusion and exclaiming, "And he  _hated_ you!"

Kyle shrugged, "You're right. I don't like him. I beat him at the mock trial and I never let him live it down. I fucked with him and Rachel just because. You know why? He was the only God damn challenge I had here. He was the only one who made me work to win, the only one who ever gave me a run for my money, the only one I ever felt like I had to  _compete_ with at all. I didn't like him, but I liked what he brought to the table. He kept me on my toes. He made me use what I learned at Harvard. I didn't like him, but I still treated him better than you did."

 

* * *

 

"Dude, you can't just walk in here!" Trevor shouted, incredulous, the day Harvey stormed inside his apartment, on a dangerous mission to find Mike, in whatever unsavory condition he was likely in.

"I just did," Harvey said. "Get out of the way, Trevor."

It wasn't exactly hard for Trevor to obey, since he was stoned out of his mind. A quick shove and he was on the couch and with absolutely no incentive to stand up again. "He's in the bathroom..." he called out quietly.

Sure enough, sitting on the floor across from the sink, Mike was there, legs crossed, furiously cutting a line of cocaine on the dirty title floor, cursing when he cut himself in the process because his vision was already blurred. That and the powder was practically useless now, since blood poured onto it every time he leaned over to draw it up his nose.

The door opened ruthlessly, slamming into his knee, but he was numb to the pain, didn't bother to move until Harvey forced his way in and he went sliding to the left, scrambling to stay upright.

"Mike..." Harvey said, taking in the sight, and the cocaine, and the blood running from Mike's nose, down his neck and his chest.  _"Jesus fuck."_

"Trevor let you in? I don't want you here. Go away, Harvey." Mike sounded vacant. The voice was clearly his but his personality - his old one - was gone. He didn't even sound particularly desperate anymore, just tired and stoned and resigned.

Harvey sighed. "Get up, Mike," he ordered. "Come on."

Mike laughed, a forced, drug-induced, sad, empty, sarcastic laugh that would've broken Harvey's heart, if, of course, he'd had one. "No," he said stubbornly.

"I mean it, Mike," Harvey said, wincing at just how bad he looked, how unhealthy, how ruined, and how the blood pouring from his nose didn't seemed to be clotting any time soon, like he'd sucked up so much coke he'd blown all the vessels in his nasal passage and then some and still didn't stop. His eyes were red, pupils dialated. "Stand up. I'll help you," he reached out his hand, but Mike slapped it away, hard.

"No!" he repeated, louder. "Fuck you! It's always this...this  _shit, Harvey!_  It's always  _Get up, Mike! Stand up, Mike! Come with me, Mike! Stay there, Mike! Do this, Mike! Do that, Mike! Take off your clothes, Mike! Shut up, Mike! Don't tell anyone, Mike! Hurry up, Mike! Not good enough, Mike! I love you, Mike. No, wait, nevermind, I don't!_  I'm sick of it!" Mike was looking up by now, voice breaking almost as pathetically as he looked, eyes watering. "I'm so sick of it! Just get  _out,_ Harvey!"

Harvey closed his eyes, tried to control his breathing, and flinched every time Mike yelled. For all of their arguments, even the tantrum Mike had thrown in his apartment, when he'd broken the miror, even all of that, Mike had never quite reached this point, this level of destruction, this tone of voice, this level of angry shouting. Every time he opened his mouth and mocked the things Harvey had told him, Harvey grimaced like he was punching him in the stomach. It was all true. It was all true and Harvey couldn't say anything to deny it.

He tried one more time to get Mike to stand up, in hopes that maybe he could stop his nose from bleeding, maybe even prevent another overdose, since Harvey figured the odds weren't in Mike's favor anymore and he'd worn out his welcome at the ER, and had just one too many close calls and near misses.

"Please, Mike," he said, softer, noting how strange the word  _Please_ sounded on his lips. It was probably the first and only time he'd ever actually used it when he was talking to Mike. He reached down and gripped his arm and pulled, still surprised at how light Mike was and how easy it was to drag him to his feet, even as he fought and struggled and cried and carried on the whole way up.

"I hate you!" Mike lied, yelling as if he might convince himself. "I fucking  _hate_ you!"

Harvey ignored him, focused on getting him to steady feet, and only said, with a patient sigh, "Don't fight me, Mike."

 _"Why_  not! What if I do?" he twisted around and out of Harvey's grip, stumbled against the wall as all of the drugs in his system hit his equilibrium at once. He turned around on unsteady feet. "What if I fight? Huh? You've already done everything to me, Harvey! What the  _fuck_  is left?" He pushed Harvey away when he reached for him, the cocaine making him absolutely fearless. "Don't  _touch_ me! Or hit me! I don't fucking care! You've already done it!"

"I never hit you!" Harvey shouted back, defensive for the first time. He struggled to press the sleeve of his shirt up against Mike's nose, but it was like trying to shoot a moving target. "I never hit you, Mike! Ever!"

Mike sobbed, moving his head back and forth, "Then just fuck me!  _Fuck_  me, Harvey! What else is there? What else can I do for you? You  _hate_ me!"

Harvey couldn't exactly argue with the first part, since there had been occasions where he'd fucked Mike when he didn't exactly say  _Yes_ , but he didn't hate him, depending on what dictionary someone was getting their definitions from. "I don't hate you, Mike," he said, lowering his voice. "I  _don't_ hate you."

"You  _do!_ " Mike argued, blinking back tears and sniffling blood as he hit his knees. He reached for Harvey's waist, then his belt, working at the buckle furiously, but uselessly, his vision blurred to the point where he was nearly seeing double.

"Mike,  _stop,_ " Harvey demanded. He reached for his shoulders again, using brute force to lift him up against his will. He gave his shoulders a sharp, rough jerk and suddenly Mike was afraid enough to stop - to stop fighting, stop shouting, stop crying, stop talking - and Harvey hated that he honestly didn't know how else to get through to him anymore, or if he'd ever used a better method in the first place.

"I'm sorry, Mike," he said, surprisingly even himself with just how genuine he sounded; how genuine he really  _was_ , despite how late it was for apologies or how obsolete they were by this point. He pulled him against him, blood from Mike's face soaking into his white shirt, staining it, but he was unconcerned. "I'm sorry," he repeated.

They stood there for a long time, Mike's cries fading and smothered by the pressure he was keeping against Harvey's chest, and he missed the times before when he'd leaned against him for other reasons, and not because he was so lost, so destroyed, and not because he was high on cocaine, and not because he was entirely apathetic toward life, but because he was happy and safe and wanted. Outside the bathroom, Trevor was coughing and muttering loudly to himself. Harvey closed his eyes and sighed against the top of Mike's head; sighed for the whole situation, for the entire fucked-up status quo and whatever level of responsibility he had in all of it, and the generally grim outcome of things, and how everything seemed to be mocking his efforts at redemption and even when he said  _Sorry, Mike_  all he heard, in his head, was-

_Too late._

 

_*_

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BLANKET TRIGGER WARNING for entire story, for: drug use, major character death, self-harm, suicide, dubcon/non-con, coercion, verbal/emotional abuse, language, excessive use of italics.

 

*

 

There was a point, just before Pearson Hardman lost Mike Ross for good, that Harvey couldn't ignore the gnawing feeling deep in his gut that told him something was wrong, terribly wrong, and as a hail Mary, he took Mike back. He let him sleep in his bed and wear his Harvard shirt and rest his head on his bicep and in return Mike had to talk to him, tell him he wasn't so far in the bell jar that this extension of humanity from Harvey wouldn't be enough to save him, had to promise to cut Trevor loose once and for all, kick the coke habit for good, and show up to work ready to kick ass like he had before.  _Before._

But being back with Harvey was only a temporary respite; the damage was already done, after all, and whether or not Harvey knew this, there was really no telling. The only sure thing was that he did  _try_  to stop it, consciously or otherwise, whether or not he even knew what he was trying to stop. He found that part out when he woke up one morning, rolled over to find several missed calls on his cell phone from an impatient client, a little too much breeze blowing in his face from the open door leading to the balcony, and a vacant place beside him in the sheets. The last part was out of the norm enough to rally Harvey out of bed, since Mike never, ever - no, really,  _never_ \- found any occasion to wake up first and often had to be all but dragged from sleep and it was probably from all of the pot he'd smoked and the fact that he was twenty-five or maybe just because he was in such a deep, relentless, untreated depression.

Maybe it was the whole trifecta.

 _"Mi-ike,"_ Harvey called, in a sing-song voice, once he was out of bed - and the scene was very movie-esque, because of that voice, and because of the way Mike didn't answer him, and the way the breeze kept pushing the curtains around and the door creaked with just the slightest ominous hint that things weren't quite right, that maybe Harvey should abort his mission for coffee and walk out onto the balcony instead, and so, suddenly unnerved by the silence, he did.

He found Mike, in a dejected heap, positioned precariously on the edge of the railing, sitting, legs hanging down, a deadly distance from the Manhattan pavement below.

"Mike,  _what-"_

"Would you have fired me?"

Mike's voice was low but casual, matter-of-fact, as if he was still within the safe confines of Harvey's bed and not dangling off of a New York City highrise. It stunned Harvey into silence, at first, as he looked around in a quiet panic, and then progressed to stuttering as he realized what was happening.

"Wh-what? Mike,  _what?"_

Mike shrugged, which unsteadied him and sent Harvey reeling, stepping forward, then back, hand over his mouth, uncertain whether to stay put or act.

"If you knew I wouldn't tell Jessica-about anything, about us or about Harvard or any of it," Mike was speaking so calmly, like he was asking about the weather, that it disturbed Harvey on an entirely new level. "Would you have fired me?"

Harvey swallowed hard, replying in a distracted way as he wracked his mind for a solution. He was used to pressure. The kind of pressure where the firm's money or reputation was on the line, where a client's money or reputation was on the line, or a business, or a professional relationship, but rarely did it broach the territory of  _life or death._ At least, not since he worked for the ADA. But that's where Harvey was at now, and he was out of his league.

"It's...Mike, it's beyond that point."

Mike hardly hesitated, peered over at the ground like he was high and it was something shiny, and said, "So, you would have, it just doesn't matter now?"

"Get down." Harvey told him, failing at sounding very stern or commanding. Instead he just sounded desperate and scared, like someone who was realizing what mattered to him at the very moment it was slipping through his fingers. Except, Harvey had been losing Mike long before he decided to hop onto a ledge, so his epiphany that maybe Mike meant slightly more to him than a good fuck or a reflection of himself at work was by then long overdue and laughably obsolete.

"Get down," he repeated, but Mike just looked over his shoulder at him with a mild, detached smile, like nothing at all was wrong, like he hadn't reached such a level of apathy that he was unaffected by his own aversion to heights or the amount of fear on Harvey's face.

"And then what?" Mike asked, looking down again, swinging his legs more than necessary, observing the view as if it was harmless, as if one wrong move wouldn't send him barrelling into the ground skull-first. At one point, he took his hands off the rails and rested them in his lap. Harvey paced in a small box and glanced inside toward the bed, calculating the time it might take to run in and get his cell phone. The odds were stacked against him, but even moreso against Mike.

"And then...we go inside..." Harvey continued looking nervously between the bedside table and the balcony. He'd talked Mike down from the ledge a hundred times. Just never literally.

Mike scoffed, "And then what, Harvey? Then I go to work? Then what? Then I come back here so you can lie to my face, tell me I'm worth more to you than an investment to your winning career, just to keep me from being an even bigger liability than I already am? Then you screw me under the pretense of giving a shit? Then you get sick of me again? Then I go back to Trevor's and do some coke? Then-"

"Mike,  _get down."_

"-Then I do too much of it and I wake up in the hospital and you argue with some dickhead doctor who thinks you're an even bigger dickhead, then I get  _out_  of the hospital and then I do some more coke, then I cut my wrists open, then you tell me I'm useless, then I take some pills,  _then what, Harvey?"_

"Then you get  _better, Mike!_  Then we  _fix. This. Mike!"_

"You can't fix me, Harvey," Mike sighed, slightly sadder and momentarily less apathetic. He looked back and shrugged, "You're the one who broke me."

 

* * *

 

Not for a lack of trying, but Mike Ross wasn't going to die by jumping off Harvey's balcony. And he wasn't going to fall off either as Harvey wrestled him back inside, but only because he was physically overpowered, which in and of itself was one of the many issues in their entire fucked up relationship. He practically threw him down onto the bed, though Mike rebounded quicker than similar occasions in the past, got to a sitting position and shook it off. Harvey backed up and paced.

"I'm done," he announced, in a shaky voice, on shaky lips, as his hands trembled. No one made Harvey Specter  _shake._  No one made Harvey Specter  _tremble._ _Mike Ross did._

"Good," Mike said, and if he was at all fazed, he buried it under all of his demons, somewhere deep inside. He stood up and marched toward the door. "So am I."

The fundamental difference in their statements was that Harvey was referring to the situation, to Mike's actions, to their relationship - charitable as the title might have been - while Mike was referring to himself. To  _life._  And Harvey had that figured out, could read Mike better than he ever let on, knew he was an iminent risk to himself, but short of actually pinning him down for the remainder of, well,  _forever,_ his hands were kind of tied.

"You're not going anywhere!" Harvey shouted.

"The hell I am." Mike wasn't concerned with listening; Harvey's commands may as well have been empty threats since they neither scared nor stopped him anymore, and since whatever Harvey might have done to keep him there, or keep him in line, was much less than what Mike might do to himself just to deal with his increasing emotional turmoil. Harvey pinning him against the wall and screaming at him was hardly competition to the consequences of overdosing on pills or doing cocaine until he heard voices and thought his head might explode or he might bleed to death out of his nose. And Harvey mentioning his job in a roundabout threatening way or fisting his hand in his hair so tight when he was high and telling him sharply to  _sober the fuck up_ all paled in comparison to taking a coke-laced razor and splitting open his own skin. There was really no level of abuse - emotional or physical - Harvey could inflict on him that Mike wasn't already doing a better job of on himself.

But before Mike left the apartment, Harvey asked him to wait. He didn't tell him to, ironically, he  _asked_  and Mike  _listened._ Probably because he knew it was the last time he'd ever have to, and probably because Harvey sounded more broken than him at the moment, and Harvey probably asked for those very same reasons, because he had a feeling he might not see Mike again, might not ever have a chance to ask him anything again, and was tired of yelling at him, ordering him around when the only places it had ever gotten them was bars and hospital triage bays and bathroom floors and the ledge of his fucking balcony.

It was time for a different approach, one that might have done some good if he'd only used it a few months earlier.

And Mike thought, just for a moment, as Harvey walked up to him, wrapped one arm around his shoulder and the other around his neck, to ask if he'd ever loved him,  _ever,_  just for a second, at any time, during whatever it was they had. Maybe for a fleeting moment in bed while they went over cases together? Or for a day when they won in court? Or a morning they woke up beside each other? But he thought better of it. He decided he already knew the answer and if Harvey lied it wouldn't do him any good, wouldn't do damn thing for the level of  _how far gone_  he was, and even if Harvey said  _yes_  and even if he  _meant it,_  somehow, Mike probably wouldn't believe him. Actions spoke louder than words, after all, and Harvey's actions had told Mike a million times, the answer, which was usually a loud and resounding  _No,_ and even if Mike did believe him, it probably was too late anyway. After all, wasn't everything?

So instead, Mike just took the opportunity to lean in, accept the embrace for what it was, he wasn't even quite sure, a silent apology, maybe, or just a resigned gesture to all of Mike's problems that Harvey couldn't fix, and was thereby throwing in the towel. Mike pressed his face against his chest, cried like he hadn't been able to for weeks, suddenly but only temporarily able to feel again, to feel all of the pain he had, and all of the love he still had, and he cried harder, took deep breaths of Harvey's shirt because he knew he'd never be able to smell him again, his cologne or his sweat or his clothes or his skin, and not because he wouldn't be in his bed, but because he wouldn't be  _anywhere_. Harvey mirrored his actions, almost, and unintentionally at that, pressing his nose and mouth down on Mike's head, running his fingers through his hair, crying, but not hard enough that Mike could hear him, just enough to know himself that he was crying, and that he was crying out of guilt and regret and for Mike and for all of the potential he'd seen drain out of him, and for all of the youth and the life he'd taken, and how he hadn't tried to - he hadn't  _tried_  to hurt him, he hadn't  _tried_  to ruin him and everything he was or was becoming or could've beenin the future, but he had anyway, he  _had._  And he had tried to fix him, but he'd ran out of resources and he'd ran out of time and out of energy and he cared, he did  _care,_  but not enough to follow Mike out the door that day. He'd wrestled enough pills from his hand, needles from his arm, razors from his fingers, drugs from his pockets, and he was at a loss. If there was more he could do, he didn't know what it was or he didn't take the time to figure it out. He just soaked Mike's hair with tears, because Mike was a waste: A waste of a genius, a waste of a  _lawyer,_  of a twenty-something, a  _waste;_  a heart-broken, starving, drug-addicted  _waste,_  and the worst part was that Harvey was supposed to have mentored him, supposed to have encouraged his potential, dragged it out of him like he'd been dredging a river, then watered it and watched it grow, but instead,  _instead_ , he had let it die - no, he'd killed it. Killed it until he was just a shell, until residual overdose-coma damage reminded Harvey of his crimes whenever Mike couldn't remember more than a single page from a book or a ten digit number for more than an hour. And so they were there, near the door, like it was some flashing beacon of finality, of what was to come, and Mike didn't want to let go and walk through it, and Harvey didn't want to make him, so they just stood there, and for a split second Harvey wished he did love him, the way Mike loved him back, because if he did and if he  _had,_  they wouldn't have been there to begin with, but he couldn't; he couldn't change that the only emotion he held for him was because he'd made him such a  _waste_  and because he was so guilty and he was supposed to be selfish and arrogant but he wasn't supposed to  _hurt people._

Mike Ross wasn't going to die by jumping off Harvey's balcony. He was going to die when he and Harvey finally pulled apart, and Harvey took his hands and pushed all the tears away from his eyes and then from his own and then kissed him - because it didn't matter if it gave him false hope, because Mike didn't even have the capacity for  _any hope_  - and he finally walked out the door and went to Trevor's. Except Trevor wasn't there, but the cocaine was, and there was more than enough of it to make him forget,  _forever._ So he used it all, as much as he could get into his sinus cavity and as much as he could force into his veins before they blew and bruised into dark hematomas under his skin. He was going to die when it all hit his nervous system and respiratory system at once, and he never really even tried to fight it, just floundered in and out of consciousness, convulsed and stopped breathing in a tragically young heap on the floor, alone, with Harvey no where around, and isn't that really what all the signs had been pointing to from the very beginning?

 _That's_ how Mike Ross was going to die.

 

*

 

 


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BLANKET TRIGGER WARNING for entire story, for: drug use, major character death, self-harm, suicide, dubcon/non-con, coercion, verbal/emotional abuse, language, excessive use of italics.

*

 

Harvey Specter was supposed to be Pearson Hardman's best closer. But two weeks after Mike Ross' died, his reputation as such was anything but. In fact, most of the firm avoided him as if his usual charm had progressed into some type of contagious plague. The associates ducked into their cubicles whenever he passed by, with a little more fear than they did when Louis passed by, and Louis himself found less and less reason to confront Harvey about, well, anything anymore. Jessica stuck to the occasional glare of maternal disappointment, and even Donna curbed her martyr instincts in favor of doing her job just long enough to bolt before Harvey could request any more of her time. It was safe to say that everyone had decided that Harvey had pulled the proverbial trigger on the proverbial gun that had killed Mike. Not everyone knew the whole story, and no one knew the exact story, but what everyone  _did_ know had left Harvey a one-man army in a sea of colleagues who were quite clearly siding with the dead twenty-five year old, which was an ironic twist of fate, and a band of support that for Mike Ross was just a few short weeks too late.

Meanwhile, as everyone quietly mourned and slowly moved on from the traumatic phone call that first stunned the firm into silence that night, Harvey did a bang-up job of ignoring the fact that everyone seemed to either hate him or fear him and instead carried on winning case after case, dragging in hordes of new clients and his performance seemed hardly affected by the fact that Mike was dead or ever even existed. The only real change in his demeanor was evident after work, when he went home and filled up glass after glass of gin, or whiskey, or both, and drank until he woke up twenty-minutes early with a fittingly punishing migraine. He usually woke up on the couch, since that's where he made a point to pass out. Several days after Mike died and several nightmares later, the bed was pretty much out of the question. Something about waking up in a cold sweat thinking he saw Mike's pale, skinny, track-marked, blood-and-vomit covered body beside him in the sheets had left him decidedly uninterested in ever even attempting to get a good night's sleep there again. Besides, as long as he was in the living room, he could pretend Mike was still alive, that they'd had some kind of fight over his bleeding heart and Harvey's lack of one, and that Mike had simply gone to bed to brood and things would be back to their regularly scheduled fucked-up normalcy by morning time.

Of course, morning always came, in a slow, cold way with harsh reminders of the status quo, and Mike was never actually there, never actually anywhere except in a dozen guilty memories and six feet under the New York City snow in a cemetery fourteen blocks away.

 

* * *

 

A month after, Jessica took Harvey's apparent lack of not only remorse, but any kind of emotion whatsoever, and his increasingly cutthroat race to the top of the top, as a sign that he was ready to forget about his sins and find another associate.

"Absolutely not, Jessica!"

Maybe she misread him.

"Harvey, you need an associate. We went over this. Every senior partner-"

"I said no."

Jessica folded her hands gracefully, stood by the door, never finding occasion to stay in anyone's office but her own long enough to sit down, and waited for Harvey to cave.

"I told you I work better alone."

"Don't be ridiculous, Harvey," she told him. "You're three weeks behind on briefs because Mike Ross hasn't been here to do them for you. You've been trying to pass them off to Louis' associates under the pretense of my orders because you're finally starting to notice that none of your subordinates around here ever particularly liked you and now that they know what you're capable of, well,  _dislike_ is a pretty charitable word, don't you think?"

Harvey cocked his head and advanced, but only just a little. "Are you  _blaming_ me, Jessica?"

"You're blaming yourself, Harvey."

"You're damn right I am!" He shook his head wildly. "He was my responsibility! I saw him every god damn day, and every god damn night, and I knew he was doing coke and I knew he was cutting and I knew he was drinking and I pretended not to. I pretended I didn't see it."

Jessica looked down at the floor because for only the first or second time in over a decade, there wasn't much she could say in Harvey's defense. He'd screwed up. He'd screwed up and Mike had killed himself and there wasn't exactly anything to say that would keep that from being irreparable truth.

Sighing, with a touch of sympathy, she said, "I want you to find a new associate by the end of the week, Harvey."

 

* * *

 

This too shall pass, or whatever the saying, seemed to be the case with all of the quiet coping at Pearson Hardman and the passive aggressive disdain for Harvey Specter and whatever it was he did or didn't do to cause or prevent Mike Ross from overdosing on opiate-laced cocaine. Eventually, everyone moved on. It wasn't a clean break, not a wake-up-and-everything's-fine kind of thing, but a gradual process that finally had the firm back to normal; back to operating at a pre-Mike morale, and in this, Harvey seemed to be, for the most part, off the hook.

But he was still drinking what was likely Mike's weight in top shelf liquor every night, still passing out on the couch, or in a chair, and occasionally even on the floor. It wasn't a cry for help or for forgiveness or understanding or for anyone to decide that he truly cared or ever truly gave a shit about what happened, it just  _was._  It was just  _fact._  It was just the  _present._ It was just what he did every day, every night, assaulting his liver with hundred proof until he was too drunk to see Mike in all of his grim conditions from days passed, and too drunk to hear his voice when he'd begged for a chance to walk away.

_Harvey, please. I'm tapping out._

_Please._

_I'm tapping out._

_Tapping out._

No one was saying that Harvey was sorry for anything other than the fact that he'd been called out, but maybe, just maybe, he'd realized what he had just in time to lose it. Maybe he'd cared slightly more than he'd been capable of showing and now that Mike was actually, irreversibly gone, he couldn't quite deal with that fact. Maybe. What went on in Harvey's head was a difficult language to translate. And hindsight is twenty-twenty. Maybe someone else could have tolerated Harvey's unrequittal and his threats and his manipulations without turning to drugs or suicide.

Maybe Mike Ross had already been a loose canon before Harvey ever even got a hold of him.

 

*

 


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BLANKET TRIGGER WARNING for entire story, for: drug use, major character death, self-harm, suicide, dubcon/non-con, coercion, verbal/emotional abuse, language, excessive use of italics.

*

 

Dr. Freeman tried to kick Harvey out of the ICU one night, where he was keeping vigil - or watch, or just killing time, whatever - at Mike's bedside. It didn't go over too well, with Harvey screeching about the law and Alex taking up for Mike, who was in no condition to hold his own ground, seeing as he was still hopelessly comatose. The peak of the argument was reached when Alex made a comment about his condition, which led to Harvey say - or shout, scream, whatever - "I didn't know he was gonna down every God damn pill in the medicine cabinet!"

"Did you not know about his wrists, either? What about the cocaine, Mr. Specter? Turn a blind eye to that too? I mean, what the  _hell_  did you think he was gonna do?"

"I broke up with him! I didn't know it was this big of a deal!"

Eventually, the two of them drew enough attention, or scared enough patients, that someone alerted security and Harvey left before someone forced him to. He ended up at the firm, middle of the night, sitting on his desk, briefly considering calling Mike's parents before remembering that the kid didn't have any.

Harvey spent most of the night there, losing countless hours of sleep he knew he could never make up for, while Mike slept inadvertently but soundly at the hospital, and it seemed that for a period, their roles were reversed. Harvey was the one in fleeting turmoil, as he set down his phone, and came to the brief but very haunting realization that he was, in fact, a ruthless, cold, emotionally-bankrupt attorney with a debatable soul and even more questionable conscience – and somehow he was all that Mike had.

 

* * *

 

Harvey Specter wasn't prepared to actually care about Mike. In the end it was apparent that he never particularly cared on a significant level, but he cared enough to stay with Mike longer than he usually made a habit. And he cared enough to take him back in order to keep him off the ledge, regardless if it had been enough to actually to make a difference by that point. In the end, anything Harvey had done to prevent the ultimate tragedy had been a hail mary that proved to be a day late and more than a dollar short. Besides, it was only the damage that was too obvious, too damning, too incriminating that Harvey felt the need to undo. The other stuff – the need for approval, the obedience, the despair, the submission – was exactly what Harvey wanted. Not what he went looking for, but what he got, and what he liked.

For example, Jessica walked into his office one day, all stoic but apologetic, saying she had three separate briefs for him and sorry there were so many, but she really needed him to do it. Harvey knew Mike would do the hard, all-night work and so he took the files and waved her out.

"Mike!" was all he had to say, and Mike was off the couch and standing in front of his desk.

"When are you going to start on these?"

"R-r-right now," Mike said. He reached out to take a folder, but Harvey pulled it back.

"You work on these during the day. Seven to seven. When you're here. Unless I authorize you to bring work home. If you're up all night it's not going to be because you're working on briefs, you got it?"

Mike nodded hurriedly - with a lack of hesitation or self-thought that just screamed of a need for mercy, but on such a desperately silent level, no one could hear him - and Harvey handed him the files.

 

* * *

 

What no one at Pearson Hardman knew during the time that Harvey and Mike were - however taboo - an  _item_ , was that Harvey actually dragged him to several therapy sessions before he'd ever turned to drugs or alcohol or self-mutilation. It wasn't an exhaustive effort on Harvey's part, nor was a dismissive way of sweeping Mike's problems under the rug, but it was  _something_ , something that might have done more good had Mike actually told the truth.

_"Would you consider your relationship healthy?"_

His therapist was a kind man about forty-five, who talked softly and never raised his voice, and was, quite ironically, the antithesis of Harvey and his temper and impossible-to-meet standards. Harvey wondered for a split second if maybe there was one too many older men in Mike's life, but so far, the sessions seemed to be helping more than hurting, so he let it go.

_"Yeah."_

The first reason Harvey shipped him off to a shrink was entirely self-serving. Mike was a perfectionist to some ungodly level that even Harvey didn't, or couldn't, operate at. It was ridiculous. He was a million miles an hour at work, in court, and then he'd crash completely and fall asleep in Harvey's office next to stacks of papers and Red Bull. It wasn't any secret that Harvey pushed him, and Harvey was only in denial that he was in fact pushing him  _that_ hard, to the point that Mike thought surviving off copious amounts of caffeine and sleeping on couches was an acceptable way to live one's life. The only problem with that policy was that it resulted in at least one day a week where Mike couldn't even function, and just getting him out of bed could have qualified as an Olympic sport.

"Come on, Mike," Harvey negotiated, shoving his shoulder. "Mike. Mike, let's go. Mike!"

"No," was the muffled moan that came from under the pillow.

"Yes," Harvey persisted. "We have court at ten. Get your ass up."

"No, Harvey, I'm tired."

"So am I, kiddo. Suck it up."

"Go  _away!"_  Mike snapped. Of all the reasons Harvey could've had for finding Mike's age somewhat troubling - like, oh, a decade being a mildly disturbing age gap, or Mike looking even younger than he was - the only part that ever actually got to him was his attitude. He didn't usually use it, but it was there, behind his blue eyes and inside his impossibly brilliant head and it was always laced with sarcasm and defiance and bitter youth, and, frankly, it pissed Harvey off. Not necessarily because he was usually the one who ended up on the receiving side of it, but because when he did it reminded him that he wasn't exactly fighting fair and still didn't have enough of a conscience to care.

"You sound like a teenager," Harvey remarked, grabbing one of Mike's legs and dragging him halfway off the bed.

Mike rolled over and fake-kicked off his grip, "I practically still am one," he said sleepily. "Give me a break."

"Jesus Christ," Harvey whispered in exasperation. Then he did the only thing that ever seemed to work. He got back in bed. He got in bed and kissed Mike's forehead and hummed and ran his hand through his hair and made the process of waking up somewhat less harsh, which was silly, but he didn't mind as much as he thought he would. He was laying in bed with a twenty-something that put him on a pedestal and forgot to take him down, and, well, the rest of the world could wait.

"You know what my shrink asked me today?"

"No," Harvey mumbled. "What?"

"He asked if our relationship is healthy."

"What did you tell him?"

Mike shrugged, tilting his head to exaggerate the thought process, "I don't know. I said yes. I don't think he was entirely convinced though – he prefaced the question by asking how old I was again."

Harvey laughed and Mike joined in, until they were both face down in the pillows and blankets, erupting into sleep-deprived hysterics. Finally, after recovering and laying side-by-side in peaceful silence for several minutes, with Harvey pushing his hair back and just staring at him lovingly, Mike found the energy to face the day.

"Okay," he sighed. "I think I'm awake now."

Harvey smiled, the wide, sincere smile he had, and it was no wonder that Mike had fallen for him. It wasn't surprising that Mike never stood a chance, never saw the end coming until he was too far gone, because in that moment everything that Harvey really was – selfish and rigid and controlling – was masterfully veiled behind his smile that was genuine and incited trust, and his voice that was kind and not yet shouting, and his hand that was stroking Mike's face and not yet pinning him down. It was deceptive and false, and not indicative of the future or their inability to maintain any semblance of a normal relationship, but it was convincing enough for Mike.

"Yeah," Harvey said. "I think you are too."

 

*


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BLANKET TRIGGER WARNING for entire story, for: drug use, major character death, self-harm, suicide, dubcon/non-con, coercion, verbal/emotional abuse, language, excessive use of italics.

*

 

When Harvey reflected on the funeral, he didn't reflect on much. Usually he was sitting at his desk, chewing ungracefully on the end of a pen, and he was staring out the window. He saw the snow, the casket, he heard the surrounding white noise of the city. But he couldn't place all of the faces. He just knew there weren't many.

Harvey was asked to say a few words.

He'd declined.

What was he supposed to say? At the time, he never considered any possibilities. He just hadn't wanted to speak. Now, looking back, he wondered. Still nothing appropriate came to mind.

_I was having an affair with Mike Ross. I treated him like shit. I knew he was an addict. I didn't care._

No good.

_I loved him. I tried to help him._

Thinly-veiled lies.

_I loved him in a sick, controlling way. I tried to help him when it wouldn't inconvenience me. When it was too late. When he was too far gone._

The truth.

_It's all my fault. I need some scotch._

The last one had a nice ring to it, Harvey thought. He didn't have any scotch left in his office though, and it was still daylight out. Jessica might walk in and she wouldn't approve and Harvey didn't have enough time in the day or energy in his veins to ride out the storm of her vague disappointment that seemed to hang around for weeks like a sinus infection. He just didn't have it in him anymore.

"Client on line three, Harvey," Donna's voice on his speaker was harsh and to the point. It reminded him he still had a job to do. It reminded him that it's been months since Mike died and most people at the firm had forgotten about his life, let alone that he was a part of theirs at one point.

He picked up the phone and held it in a ruthless grip. He thought of Mike's wrist.

"Specter." he said. His voice gave no evidence to the minor battle he was waging inside his head over the here-and-there guilt afflicting his once-in-a-while give a damn during the every-now-and-then visitation by his deadbeat conscience. He sounded almost robotic.

The client started on about finances and Wall Street and Harvey tried not to tell him that the case could be won by a sleeping Louis Litt and tried to hear the man out instead, if only because interrupting him would take more effort. He was distracted anyway. He squeezed the phone.

_Harvey, let go._

_Put the needle down, Mike._

_Let go!_

_Put it down and I will, Michael._

Harvey was pretty sure he didn't do anything wrong. Right? He contemplated the duplicity of the situation and all the other ones like it. Twist Mike's arm until he cried out, or watch him shoot up. It wasn't cruel. It was tough love. He just wasn't sure if he still believed it. His justification seemed weak. He said something to make his client think he was paying attention, and then he imagined if his own case would hold up in court. He thought it wouldn't. He thought he could poke so many holes in his own theory - that everything he did was only to protect Mike - that if it were a ship, it would take on water and sink before any party won or lost.

Because sometimes Mike wasn't going to shoot up. Sometimes he wasn't holding a needle. Sometimes Mike was in the file room and no one else was at the office and sometimes he was just doing his job. And sometimes he was in Harvey's apartment. Or his own, as was the case one particular Thursday that Harvey can't get out of his head. He remembers certain things; like that there was a lot of drug paraphernalia and that Mike wasn't wearing a shirt...

 

*

 

"The fuck is this, Harvey, a welfare check?"

"You could say that," Harvey replied, shrugging stiffly in his suit. He looked out of place amidst the cheap apartment and all of the evidence of a life lived at half-mast and a million miles an hour. There were clothes everywhere, dishes piled high, papers scattered, work briefs stacked on the table. The TV was on, but silent. Cans of Red Bull littered the floor. It smelled like nicotine and pot and despair.

"Well, you can leave now," Mike avoided Harvey's judging stare in favor of sitting down on the couch and immersing himself in work, armed with a cigarette and a highlighter. "I'm fine."

Harvey nodded sarcastically from across the room. "I'd say."

Mike rolled his eyes. "If you're here for the Stark files, I'm on the last hundred so I'll be done in twenty minutes."

"I'm not here for that," Harvey told him.

"Whatever."

Annoyed but patient, Harvey walked over and took the liberty of sitting down across from Mike on the coffee table. He shoved the papers out of his way, and Mike didn't have much choice but to lean back a little and look at him.

"How long, Mike?" Harvey asked.

Mike ignored him but appeared wildly unhappy about his decision to plant himself right in the way of his work. He reached for the papers but Harvey pushed his hand away, somewhat roughly, which was all fairly typical. Mike shook his head and rolled his eyes again. He took a long drag of the cigarette.

"How long  _what,_ Harvey?" he spit.

"How long are you going to keep up the spoiled teenager act? I'm getting sick of the attitude, Mike. Really sick of it."

"Give me a break," Mike scoffed. He rolled his eyes; it wasn't helping his case. "I'm hardly spoiled, Harvey. Look _around."_

"You talk to me like there are no consequences for anything that comes out of your mouth!"

Mike shrugged, "And you treat me like shit. All's fair in love and war, Harvey."

"Put out the cigarette."

"Fuck off."

"Put it  _down_ , Mike."

Once in a while, Mike would venture to disobey Harvey's demands, but that wasn't very often. And usually, if he did, he reconsidered before Harvey actually had to force him. But he was feeling particularly untouchable that night, so he took another drag, and glared back with young, rebellious eyes.

He exhaled the smoke in Harvey's direction, and said, "Make me."

Harvey's eyes darkened, and without hesitation, he reached over for Mike's wrist, capturing it in a ruthless grip. He jerked it so hard that Mike dropped what was left of his cigarette into his lap. It rolled onto the floor and fizzled out.

"Congratulations," Mike scowled, stifling a whimper. "You're stronger than me."

Harvey maintained his grip on his wrist. "That's not the point, Mike."

"Then what  _is_ the point?" Mike shouted. Even Harvey cringed a little at his tone; it was desperate and loud and it was calling Harvey out on all of his injustices without actually naming them. "What is the fucking  _point_ , Harvey?"

"The point is that you need to stop doing this shit! You can't be a lawyer and self-destruct! Smoking, pot, cutting, drinking - it all stops now! You got it? It all stops  _right_ now, Mike."

Mike was sniffling by this point; blue eyes watering. He'd sunken down into the couch cushions in a weak attempt to just dissolve into it altogether. At least then he wouldn't have to face Harvey and all of his disappointment staring back at him, lecturing him on his terrible life choices and failing to realize that he was the sole cause of most of them in the first place. His hand rested in his lap, and Harvey's was still clenched around his wrist.

"I will help you stop, Mike," Harvey promised. He leaned in, knee between Mike's legs, and kissed him. "I'll help you."

Mike was crying silently now, but he kissed back. He was close to asking Harvey why they couldn't be normal, but he caught himself. He already knew why. They could never be a normal couple because Harvey was too concerned with his career and his public image, and fucking your twenty-four year old associate was bad press. They could never be a normal couple because it was a constant competition; a battle of the egos of a senior partner and a brilliant, rebellious kid. It was a powertrip; unequal and unfair, like putting a pit bull into a ring with a golden retriever. It was a game. They could never be normal. Besides, Mike figured, he himself wasn't normal. His mind operated at incredibly impractical speeds, and there was a dark downside to that kind of overstimulating intellect. It exhausted him. Compounding that was the complex that Harvey's domineering personality had given him, and coupled with the desire to do everything and please him above all else left the kid wound tight and sleep deprived. It was a lose-lose situation, any way Mike spun it. But he still couldn't let go. He could say  _Fuck off_  and he could mean it, but he lacked the will to act on it. He loved Harvey and that seemed to triumph over everything else, like the pain in his wrist.

"Harvey, that hurts," Mike whispered, between the kissing that had resumed. He tried to pull his hand away, but it was like trying to pry a car door from the jaws of life. His wrist was skinny and Harvey was strong. "Let go."

"You didn't listen to me," Harvey said coldly against his ear. Mike shivered. "I told you to put out the cigarette and you didn't listen. You  _always_ listen to me."

"I know, I'm sorry," Mike's voice was weak and young and frightened; there was no need to proceed with more punishment. He felt badly enough. He knew better than to wait even a second longer than necessary before complying with an order from Harvey. Normally he had no desire to hesitate; he got to work immediately. But he'd been angry and hurt and he'd known that disobeying was the surest way to get to Harvey. Only now it was all backfiring.

"It's okay." Harvey slowly let go of Mike's wrist, leaving an increasingly dark bruise in the wake of his grip. He kissed him again, this time harder, and ran his hands along his chest. "Just listen next time."

Mike nodded and focused on his breathing. It always became a little harder to do so when Harvey was touching him. And most of the time, he didn't care. He loved Harvey, so he was okay with it. He wanted it. But not tonight. Tonight he was still angry. Still hurt. And his wrist was throbbing. And he was a little scared. Tonight, he didn't want it. He was intimidated and fearful and upset and exhausted and regardless of what happened, he had one hundred briefs to read through by eight a.m., and if he didn't get back to them soon, he'd surely be up all night. So when Harvey's hand drifted down to his jeans, he gently pushed it and tried to slide away, muttering something about work.

Mistake. Harvey pulled him back and had him effortlessly pinned. "Don't worry about it."

"You'll be mad tomorrow."

Harvey knew that even if he kept Mike up late, the kid would still stay up and finish his work. Either way, it was going to get done. So he carried on, kissing Mike roughly, yanking his jeans off, pushing his hands away as they objected. Finally, all of Mike's silent struggling and tears annoyed him enough that he pulled away and snapped.

"The hell is wrong, Mike?"

"You'll be mad if I don't finish the Stark briefs, Harvey," Mike said. He was crying now, fumbling over his words, sniffling, choking, quite clearly terrified of the situation and potential ramifications. "You'll be mad, and, and, and you'll yell at me!"

"Mike, no, I won't."

"But you  _will_!"

"Mike-"

"And I can't take it, Harvey, I  _can't_! When you yell at me, when you're mad, I just want to die. It's the worst feeling in the world."

What Mike was actually trying to say, but couldn't quite articulate, was that no matter what he did, he always got in trouble. Perhaps that's why he in fact felt so helpless. Because nothing he did was ever good enough for Harvey. Whether he finished the briefs or not, there would always be a problem. Something he missed, a deadline he didn't quite make, or at the least, more work waiting for him the second he turned something else in. There was no such thing as a break. He was the horse in  _True Grit;_ Harvey was going to use him to get as far as he could, and Mike was going to die of exhaustion in the process.

"Mike, relax," Harvey said. He gave him a gentle shake. "Look at me. I won't yell at you. Okay?"

Mike nodded, but he was unconvinced. "Okay."

The next several minutes seemed to last forever for Mike, as he tried to go along with everything but found himself increasingly uncomfortable and afraid. He looked across the table at the stack of papers. He writhed away from Harvey and his exploring hands, but each time Harvey would jerk him back and growl his name in warning.

"Mike..."

"Harvey," Mike gasped finally, after working up the nerve for a solid ten minutes. "I don't want to do this."

"Let's go," Harvey said, ignoring him and dragging him up by his good wrist. He pulled him forward toward the bedroom, and Mike put on his brakes, pleading and carrying on the whole way.

"Harvey-"

" _Now_ , Mike." He pulled harder, and Mike stumbled forward. When it came to strength, Harvey won, hands down. And he proved it again by pushing Mike down on the bed like he weighed absolutely nothing. The thing was, Mike wasn't entirely helpless. In fact, he  _was_ strong. He could put up a good fight. After all, he and Trevor had had a lot of them in their day and often Trevor was the one worse for wear. The trouble was that Harvey was just  _even stronger._ He also seemed to pick up on Mike's predisposition to fear and the idea that it seemed to work as a good incentive to cooperate. On top of that, Mike also seemed to sense that Harvey wasn't more than a few warnings away from fighting dirty, which meant he seemed like the kind of person who could segway to a particularly ruthless sort of violence rather quickly. Mike, aside from misdemeanor marijuana dealing, was not a risktaker. In fact, what likely spurred him to even fight back at all was a result of the mild panic coursing through him as Harvey settled on top of him and held him down. Mike thought about the times before when Harvey had grabbed his wrist or his hand or his arm and hadn't taken no for an answer when Mike told him to let go. There was just something in his eyes that told him he wasn't going to stop; that Mike had no say in the matter whatsoever. But instinctively, he still struggled.

"Don't fight me, Mike," Harvey sighed. It was almost like he couldn't be bothered to use any force, but he would if he had to. He was solid muscle and all of his weight on top of Mike made it difficult to breathe, but it did effectively keep him in place. Mike still tried to free himself from the vice-like grip Harvey was keeping on his wrists. After a few minutes, Harvey decided he was too tired to physically fight the kid, and he knew the one other thing that would get Mike to cave, besides threatening his job or twisting his arm or - as Harvey had been so tempted on previous occasions - a good punch in the face. He had enough self-restraint to have never acted on the latter thus far. So instead he leaned in close, took one hand off Mike's wrist and ran it through his hair, over and over in soothing rhythm. He could feel Mike's heart racing, thumping hard under his chest.

_"I love you."_

That was all it took. Things weren't to the point just yet that Mike doubted everything Harvey said. He was still a little naive. He was still twenty-four. He was still knee-deep in hero-worship and completely over his head. He had his doubts, but he loved Harvey so much that he decided if there was any chance that he loved him back, he was going to take it. Besides, regardless of whether or not Harvey was actually being genuine, he was an expert at looking and sounding like he was. And he did. And it worked. Mike stopped struggling, stopped panicking-

Gave in completely.

 

* * *

 

Mike was dead.

As in, six feet under in a cedar box that cost about five thousand dollars; a debt that his grandmother took to her own grave a few months later - dead.

He was twenty-five when he died, but just barely; when he overdosed on cocaine. Twenty-five when Harvey found him on the floor of his apartment, needle still in a pale, bruised and ravaged arm. Twenty-five when Harvey freaked out, started CPR, and dialed 911 on speaker phone. But, like the rest of Harvey's efforts, his frantic compressions were in vain. Too late.

A lot of things were too late that day. The paramedics were too late, the medicine was too late, the rush to the hospital was too late. Dr. Freeman spent thirty-seven minutes pushing atropine and epinephrine in a trauma room before snapping off his gloves, calling time of death, and storming out. Harvey had to sidestep to avoid being hit by the swinging door. He wasn't sure it was unintentional. But it didn't matter. He was too busy looking beyond the doors at Mike's body on the table. Thin, sunken, palid; carved up by razors and decimated by self-loathing.

Harvey stood over him for the longest time. Alex joined him a while later. There was a bit more sympathy in his voice when he spoke, just a little, like he figured Harvey was somewhat to blame but in the end Mike had done it to himself and no one really deserved to stand over a dead body in the ER wondering if they could've done more to prevent something that had potentially been inevitable from the very beginning. There were just too many variables for Freeman to presume that Harvey had in fact tried to pull theoretical trigger on the theoretical gun that had killed Mike.

"Tox screen couldn't even measure it," he said quietly. "Enough cocaine in his system to kill a few horses. He never had a chance."

Harvey didn't know if that should make him feel better or worse. On one hand, if Mike had never had a chance, then nothing Harvey had done could have prevented standing over his body in an emergency room. But if he  _had_ had a chance, then that meant that Harvey tried everything and Mike died anyway. Or worse, Harvey hadn't tried hard enough. The what-ifs were beginning, and they were enough to drive anyone crazy.

He put his head down just to cope with the moment.

 

*


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mike was distracting. Everything about the kid was distracting: his youth, his energy, his eyes, his face, his mouth, his voice, the way he stood there in front of Harvey like he would take his own heart out of his chest should Harvey decide he wanted one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BLANKET TRIGGER WARNING for entire story, for: drug use, major character death, self-harm, suicide, dubcon/non-con, coercion, verbal/emotional abuse, language, excessive use of italics.

*

 

Three weeks after he hired Mike, Harvey sat at his desk waiting for his blue-eyed associate to rush in. Like clockwork, nineteen-minutes, twenty-two seconds early, he rushed in the door.

"What should I start on?" he asked Eager. Innocent.

Harvey just stared.

"Harvey," Mike said.  _"Harvey?"_

"Yeah," Harvey shook his head and broke his gaze. Mike was distracting. Everything about the kid was distracting: his youth, his energy, his eyes, his face, his mouth, his voice, the way he stood there in front of Harvey like he would take his own heart out of his chest should Harvey decide he wanted one. Mike was promising. He was optimistic. He was  _happy._ Not perfectly, not indelibly, not without that gentle ache inside for the loss of his parents and for his ailing grandmother and the general difficulty of life up to this point, but certainly and by far miles and miles and one Harvey Specter away from drugs and suicide, so, yeah, Mike was  _happy._

For now.

They flirted somewhat shamelessly that day and the days that followed, until Mike started losing a little more sleep over what he presumed Harvey thought of him, started hanging on to his every word more and more, and they ended up in Harvey's living room with those McKessenfiles all over the floor. But  _before_  that - before the beginning of the end - they just flirted. Mike would ask how he could help, and knew that the way he stood and looked young and adorable and compliant was driving Harvey insane. Harvey would lose himself in thought, watching Mike's lips move and tuning out everything he was actually saying until Mike would yell his name to snap him out of it. Then they would both smirk, and whenever Jessica or Donna or Louis would walk in, they would stop with the looks and start with the paperwork or with discussing the case.

It went on.

Four days after the McKessen File Night. That was the day that Harvey was going to freeze Mike in inside his mind: Ordering pizza, sitting in his office on the couch, looking over an unwinnable case, discussing the likelihood of finding any loopholes. After all, if anyone could, Harvey had come to figure, it would be Mike - he had a way of thinking them out of the trickiest corners.

"My God," Harvey announced in feigned disgust. He walked over to Mike, sat down beside him, and extracted a highlighter from between Mike's lips. The kid had, moments before, noisily downed a Red Bull in about two swallows. "Were you never parented? Never fed?"

Mike laughed, but then his expression faded. Harvey apologized.

"It was a long time ago," Mike said softly. "It's not a big deal now."

"If you want to talk about it, kid, I'm here."

Harvey wasn't really sure he wanted Mike to actually take him up on the offer. Fortunately for him, Mike didn't really want to take Harvey up on his offer either. After all, talking openly about his parents' death wasn't something that came easily; it wasn't like talking about law or the weather. Words were a lot harder to find for that topic; came out bitter and broken. He'd rather just avoid it. But there was something. There was one thing he wanted Harvey to know. It probably wouldn't make a difference, but-

"No, it's okay. I just...," Stumbling over his words already.  _Weak._ He admonished himself. "I just-"

"You just what, Mike?" Harvey leaned back, looked him straight in the eye, shamelessly riled the butterflies in Mike's stomach that had until that point had settled into a well-behaved heap somewhere inside but were now fluttering up a storm, triggering his heart to race, his palms to sweat. Mike was intimidated by everything about Harvey: his looks, his intellect, his age. What he didn't know was that Harvey was intimidated by him, too, and for precisely the same reasons. It was one thing that went well unspoken.

Mike took a breath, "Sometimes I just feel alone. I don't-I don't mean right now, and I don't mean like, with relationships. I mean, in the big picture, I just feel like I'm alone in the world. Or something, I don't know, Harvey, I can't explain it, I'm sorry, this is stupid,  _I'm_  stupid."

"That you  _definitely_ aren't," Harvey assured him. Emotions were scary, but Harvey had two feet in the quicksand now, so he added, "Not even close. Keep going."

"I don't know," Mike shrugged. "I have no family. No brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles. I'm not naive enough to think my grandmother is going to be around forever. I'm only twenty-four, and I have no one. I should be used to it, I guess, but it still scares me. Sometimes I think I'm gonna panic, not be able to hack it in the real world anymore."

Harvey wasn't used to feeling bad for people; for the kind of quiet but gnawing sense of sympathy that was building inside of him for Mike. He was far more accustomed to his usual sociopathic tendency to hear even the most heartbreaking story and carry on with his day unfazed. Mike had the uncommon ability to break through this wall, but, only just barely.

After a thoughtful pause, Harvey said cautiously - because who was he to be promising anything, let alone  _himself_ , to someone as increasingly fragile as Mike? "You have me, kid."

 

*

 

The problem with Mike breaking through that wall Harvey had was that there just wasn't a whole lot behind it to begin with. If Harvey was cold and emotionally vacant to start with, then the version of him that Mike's youth and energy brought out was at best only slightly warmer and still mostly void of feelings. Which might have made Mike feel better - knowing that it wasn't personal, that maybe he was incapable of really loving  _anyone_  - if he hadn't felt so completely awful in the first place.

"You could have said  _something,_ Harvey!"

The scene - the despair of it - was becoming more and more common. It was ten weeks before he overdosed for the last time; Harvey's apartment.

"I just got interrogated for three hours! Jessica's going to find out, she is, and I'm going to be screwed. And you're… _you're_ -"

Mike wasn't supposed to be there, but he was, skinny tie undone, standing in the living room looking absolutely betrayed. Harvey just watched him, consistently annoyed by the kid's complete surprise at this turn of events. Harvey hadn't hung him out to dry when he lost a case because someone in tech support had screwed up, but he also hadn't backed him up, which was why Mike was there and carrying on loudly.

In Harvey's defense - which was getting weaker and weaker - while he usually fully intended to stand up for Mike (as he typically did in the absence of Mike's presence) he had a meeting with a client and well, priorities. Mike was one, but he was still a ways down the list, somewhere under work, women, cars, and winning. He was competing for Harvey's time against things that he didn't have the slightest idea how to beat. After all, brilliant though he was, at the end of the day he was still a college-drop out with a relapsing marijuana habit. Surely Harvey could do better, which led Mike to wonder why he was even fighting for the man in the first place. Besides that, Harvey was trying to teach the kid to stand on his own two feet. Thus, leaving him to fend for himself was more of a strategy than anything else.

"I'm  _what_ , Mike?" Harvey advanced, but only in a meager, lazy kind of way that spoke to the level of apathy bleeding through that he had toward Mike and their relationship, or, perhaps, lack thereof. "I'm what?"

"You're not going to be there!" Mike tossed his hands up and sighed. He looked sad. That may have been the night; the switch that flipped him from  _happy_ to  _sad_ in the span of a few minutes. It wasn't that situation, specifically; more likely it was the combined exhaustion and fear of loving someone as predictably passive aggressively cold (and sometimes less passive) as Harvey, that rendered Mike Ross changed from that point on. Himself, of course, but different. Angrier. Thinner. Weaker.

_Sad._

"You're not going to be able to help me. You won't back me up, and I'll get fired, and you'll forget all about me."

Bitterly ironic as Mike's words later were, Harvey didn't realize it at the time. Didn't foresee that in a couple months he'd be throwing back gin and whiskey and forgetting everything - cases, court dates, client meetings -  _except_ Mike. Which was just as well. There were no red flags just yet; Mike's arms were free of track marks, he was sober, and he still had a will to live.

Which could be why Harvey sits in his office trying to think of nights like that. Like the McKessen file night when they had their first kiss, and then even this night when Mike was voicing his sense of betrayal in Harvey's living room. Even if he was upset, at least, Harvey told himself, he was still alive. Which was a lot more than he could say later on.

And that night, between Mike's disappointment and his concern for someone finding out about his Harvard cover-up, all Harvey particularly saw was a scolded kid who felt like his parent had just sided with his teacher. It just wasn't a big deal. Mike was being dramatic. Harvey was older, level-headed, could see beyond the moment, beyond a mistake.

Mike was young, head over feet, and he couldn't.

He paced in front of the floor-length windows in obvious turmoil. Turmoil that was tame, relative to everything that followed, but turmoil still for a twenty-four year old in the clutches of a lie and what felt frighteningly like love.

From across the room, Harvey just watched him, and then sighed.

"First of all, sit down. You're like the Energizer Bunny," he pointed to the couch. Mike might have thought about it, but he didn't. He was sitting before he realized that had it been a bridge Harvey had pointed off of, he'd already be drowning. Which, in some theoretical way, he'd already was.

"Secondly," Harvey announced, striding toward him. "Jessica is in like a lion, out like a lamb. Her anger has a very short half-life, Mike. You'll be fine."

Mike dropped his head for a moment and then looked up, risky trust in his eyes. "I will?"

Harvey was so astute and so self-assured, and Mike was so much the opposite that all it really took was, "Absolutely," and Harvey swore he could hear him exhale in relief.

"Okay," he said, steadiness returning to his voice. "And the Harvard thing?"

"You let me deal with that," Harvey said, much the same way he'd said  _absolutely,_ maybe a bit more stern. "You just worry about our case." He raised an eyebrow, "All right?"

Mike nodded and was quiet, just sat and averted his eyes. Harvey disappeared into the kitchen, and when he came back, Mike apologized, in a marginally pathetic way, which was not the way he apologized to others, which was either much less pathetic or simply non-existent, since he didn't feel the need to do so that often, except with Harvey, for one reason or another.

"I'm sorry."

"What for?"

Mike shrugged, "Yelling?"

"That wasn't yelling," Harvey scoffed. And surely enough, Mike would find out what true expenditure of the voice really was and just how loud the two of them were really capable of shouting at each other.

"I know you back me up a lot when I'm not around. If you didn't, I wouldn't still be here. But today…" his voice broke a little, again. "You just went home."

Harvey sat down beside him and sighed, "I was trying to teach you to swim, Mike. If you screw up, you screw up. You get back up. You keep going. You stand up for yourself, Mike. You stand up for yourself because eventually I won't be there."

Mike was nodding furiously in agreement by this point. They sat for several minutes. Mike absorbed Harvey's words, processed them - filed them to the front of his brain where he kept just about every single thing Harvey told him. The last sentence gnawed at him though, and Harvey knew what the problem was.

"I mean, you won't be an associate forever. I'm just trying to prepare you, because that's my job." he said. His ability to reassure him was effortless in those earlier days. "I didn't mean that I'm going anywhere. Just eventually, one day, when you're on your own in a firm."

Mike gave him a weak, grateful smile. "And right now?" he asked hopefully.

Harvey shrugged, leaned back comfortably, rested his hand on the back of Mike's neck and squeezed gently. "Right now," he smiled. "I'm pretty happy here."

 

 

* * *

 

 

Time passed after Mike's death in a way that varied just enough from normalcy for Harvey to notice. The days had a strange lull to them; a sort of slow-motion collection of hours in between cases and court, and the nights, of course, evaporated in blurry segments of drinking and passing out between thoughts of would've, could've, should've.

And if Harvey wasn't a complete workaholic  _before_  Mike died, he certainly was after.

The fact of the matter was this, albeit a difficult, medicinal truth to swallow: Harvey had to move on. Not that it would be a devastatingly tricky thing to do since he wasn't torn up about the loss in a normal way. Remember, he had gone back - almost bizarrely fast - to working and winning and to being seemingly in denial of the tragedy. Eventually, the whole fake it until you make it routine started to work. Aside from the extra liquor and the avoiding the bed part of the evenings, Harvey Specter was back to operating at a pre-Mike morale.

But there were things.

Things that threw him off that game, off his rediscovered sense of peace; things that threatened to reignite the guilt he'd started to bury, somewhat successfully, in the pit of his stomach and the back of his mind.

Things.

Like when he had to communicate with Rachel, and every once in a while she would give him a strange, almost vacant look. He couldn't pinpoint what it meant, and it was very fleeting. She would do her work and bolt immediately, as if staying too long in his presence might make her take her own life the way Mike had.

Other things.

Like Harvey walking in on Louis making a crack about Mike Ross; about how he'd outsmarted the kid or how he'd lost the mock trial or how Harvey had done an absolutely A plus job of raising his prodigy. The last one was always, since Mike was in fact gone, said with a heavy dose of biting sarcasm that hit the wrong nerve in Harvey. As if there was a good one.

"Shut up, Louis." he would say. And because Louis was afraid of him, but still insensitive, he would duck away, though smirk and shrug as he did. And when he didn't slink away like some kind of creature Harvey was warding off with his tone, Harvey would continue in the same vein. "You've really sunk this low? Pick on someone who can fight back."

Louis was always nervous, but he always struck back without a beat. "That's a good one, Harvey. I should've told you that when you met him."

There were some scenarios where Harvey might have actually punched Louis for remarks of that caliber, but he didn't. He was too tired, and he'd kind of set himself up for it. He just swallowed down his guilt and walked away; made an effort to ignore it as it bubbled relentlessly back to the surface.

And finally, it always seemed like the days he was able to control it all; the days he convinced himself that he really couldn't have foreseen the depth of Mike's problems, and the nights he drank one less glass of whiskey and actually entertained the idea of sleeping in his bed again (thought he still slept on the couch) - were the days he would see them.

Highlighters. Red Bull cans.

Unsurprisingly, they were common items in a law firm. In fact, his desk was littered with yellow Sharpies, and most of the associates were rode so hard they had several spent energy drink cans on their desks at any given time. It was just the moments at which Harvey would notice them, that sent him back to certain nights, to certain conversations, fights, incidents; good, bad, loving, the ones that teetered dangerously on the verge of violent. And besides, no one else drank a Red Bull quite like Mike did, in one or two (at most) indignant, childish gulps, and no one else sat like an octopus on Harvey's office couch with papers everywhere and a neon cap between his teeth, eyes all focused like he was doing the work specifically to save Harvey and Harvey alone.

No one else came close.

The part that drew a rather thick line between the black and white and the grey of what he was feeling was that Harvey wasn't sitting around asking God or anyone else to bring Mike back. He didn't try to bargain with time or fate, and he was far too rational to will some kind of rewind button to manifest on the theoretical cover of life. He didn't grieve like he'd lost someone he loved. Perhaps because he didn't love Mike, not in the traditional sense, but there was something there, something strong and obnoxiously cemented in him, as though Mike had been his own limb of some kind and Harvey was left with phantom pain as it was sawed off. Of course, if he had the power, he would bring Mike back. But less for anyone else's sake - including Mike's - and more for his own. Because if Mike was still alive, it meant Harvey didn't do anything wrong. He hadn't been cruel. He hadn't pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed. If was Mike was alive, it meant Harvey was off the hook. And life would be easier if he was off the hook, if it was more Mike's death that he was having the hardest time coping with and less the idea that he had been responsible for Mike's  _life_  - and failed miserably.

Jessica picked up on Harvey's continued discontent.

"Harvey," she said, commandingly empathetic, on a Friday. "A moment in my office."

He rolled his eyes and complied.

"Jessica," he acknowledged.

"Sit down, Harvey."

He smirked, "Another glowing review, is this?"

"You know that goes without saying. This is about Mike."

Harvey's expression darkened. "Of course it is. Try to send me to another shrink and I'll quit tonight."

"And go where? You're as loyal as you are stubborn."

"You don't need to keep checking up on me." He ignored her critique.

"But I do," she said. "I'm responsible for you, Harvey. I always have been."

_Responsible._

God, Harvey hated that word. He hated half the legal terms he used on a daily basis:  _responsibility, liability, culpability, accountability._ It made him feel like a hypocrite. It wasn't how he was supposed to feel. He didn't hurt people, not intentionally, and in the rare event that he did - by someone else's error - he made it right, like in the case of Clifford Danner. He didn't originally perceive himself to be so inflexibly cruel, so unfairly demanding. But, gradually and then suddenly, that's what he'd become.

And as a result, he  _was_  responsible. He settled back to face it, not that he ever went too long without trying to do that.

"My actions are my actions, Jessica. You're not guilty by association."

Jessica permeated concern and sympathy, two things she reserved for few people besides Harvey. "You walk around these days like you're wearing orange."

"I…" Harvey sighed, frustration building, on his face and in his voice. There weren't many instances where he couldn't look Jessica in the eye, but this was one of them. He stared at the floor before continuing. "I knew he was dying -  _drowning_  - and I didn't do a damn thing about it. What kind of lawyer - what kind of  _man_ \- sits by and watches a kid die? I can't…I can't do my job knowing what I know. It goes against everything I ever stood for - everything you ever taught me."

Harvey hadn't told anyone that, hadn't let on even remotely that he blamed himself to that degree. There was an unspoken promise that the confession would never leave the room.

Jessica leaned forward in her seat; folded her hands. "What I taught you? Was to recognize when you made a mistake, own up to it, make it right. And if you couldn't, then to move on."

Harvey met her gaze, held it for a second, until he felt like a child - helpless and wrong and confused, emphatically unworthy of her support that he was convinced he'd done so little (outside of bringing in profit) to deserve - and looked to the floor.

"You owe it to yourself, to the firm. And to Mike," Jessica said. "Move on, Harvey. That's an order."

 

 

* * *

 

 

The idea that Harvey was so possessive and controlling in the majority of other aspects in his life made it less shocking that he would be the same way with Mike. The only difference was that all of the other aspects weren't other people. They were inanimate objects, ideas, theories, plans; cars, cases, legal maneuvers. Not human beings. Not twenty-four year olds. The difference was significant.

Furthermore, the effect on things like that - things without feeling, without the ability to be hurt - were limited, usually positive, and often neutral. Applying the same treatment to Mike wasn't the same. The outcome was disastrous.

But Harvey never looked that far ahead. It was safe to say that Mike didn't either, that he didn't think about where he might be in a few months when he was busy looking for a last name in the file room; didn't give the grim future much thought, or any at all, when Harvey walked in, locked the door, snaked an arm tight around his waist, whispered harshly against his neck.

"You talk to that paralegal a lot."

"We work together," Mike said coolly, while his heart beat underneath like he was in the lead pack of an Olympic race. "Sometimes I need her help."

"You were talking to her in the break room. Was she helping you make your lunch?"

Harvey tightened his grip a little more, and Mike's heart revved. Lap two, lap three, lap four; he felt like he might have a heart attack. And he couldn't move or do a thing about it.

"I wasn't talking to her. She was talking to me."

Harvey hissed, "Don't be a smartass, Mike."

Mike almost laughed, but between Harvey's arm under his ribcage and his teeth grazing his neck, he made a noise that sounded a lot more like a whimper. When Harvey finally let go, Mike braced himself against the wall of files and tried not to make his relief too obvious; tried not to make it so glaringly clear that for several minutes all of his control had been completely stripped and that while part of him liked it - because it was Harvey - another part of him had been half scared to death.

"I thought you didn't  _care_  anyway?" Mike asked, looking across his arm as he negotiated with his heartbeat to return to an acceptable rate per minute. Things weren't to the point yet where Mike didn't realize how unsafe it was to prod Harvey with stupid rhetoricals like that.

"I don't," Harvey told him, adjusting his suit. He pointed to the shelf. "Bring the rest of those home. You can finish them there."

He turned around to leave and Mike thought about keeping his mouth shut, but not for long, and he was feeling a little fearless.

"You mean," he called out. "I can stay up all night and finish them while you sleep? Okay, sounds great, Harvey."

Harvey stopped at the door, tossed his head up and smirked, "Good boy," he said. "You're catching on."

 

 

* * *

 

 

Mike felt like he was walking on egg shells. Nothing he did was enough, but sometimes he got close. If he drank enough energy drinks and he finished enough briefs by a certain time and a certain day to a certain level of perfection, and if he skipped breakfast and lunch and sometimes dinner, and if he barely slept, and lived and breathed work, he could get  _close._ Which gave him the incentive - that and his adoration of, or, maybe,  _addiction to_ , Harvey - to keep trying, even if any sane or otherwise reasonable person would have figured out that  _close_ was in fact as close as they were ever going to get.

Still, he tried.

The ramifications of failing to meet the standard Harvey set, which was somewhere in the sky in a ridiculous subset of life called  _impossible,_ is where the eggshells came into play. He knew how Harvey might react - the several variables he might see - he just wasn't certain which one he would get in what way or on what day. Usually, Harvey held back as long as Mike seemed to be getting  _close._ He'd just give him a few disappointed looks to incite even more inhuman effort, and it always worked.

Then of course, when Mike ultimately and not-so-unexpectedly burned out, Harvey found it in him to slow the kid down, ship him to a short-lived handful of therapy sessions, and generally back off. And as soon as he appeared to recover, Harvey was back to jerking the bit. And Mike was used to working under pressure - good at it, in fact - but sometimes it made screwing up easier. And sure enough, all his consistent sleep deprivation and perpetual worry about screwing up finally made him, well, screw up.

 _Really_ screw up.

Not like the little things he'd done. He didn't let a witness slip away, didn't lose at a mock trial, didn't forget how to file a subpoena - didn't do anything that wasn't completely understandable for a new associate, nothing that Harvey couldn't chalk up to youth and inexperience; nothing that couldn't - in some way or another - be  _fixed._

Then, between working under Harvey and in what felt like a pressure cooker, he shredded the only proof that a client had in a multi-million dollar Wall Street lawsuit, and instead made seventy copies of a blank sheet of paper while staring at the wall in a trance, mind racing exhaustively over the status quo. And when Mike realized his error, he stood in the file room fighting back tears. He knew the longer he put off telling Harvey, the worse the outcome would be. But that didn't mean it was any easier to do.

He crept into Harvey's office on the day in question like a feral cat, theoretical tail between his legs, eyes stinging, heart racing, potentially more terrified of the personal fallout of his mistake than the professional one. It didn't help that Harvey was at his desk looking slightly more pissed than usual, staring at a file in deep concentration. He immediately shooed Mike away without looking up.

"What's the problem, Mike?" he asked, disinterested, when Mike didn't leave and instead lingered nervously nearby. He still didn't look up.

"I…."

" _Come_  on," Harvey muttered, condescendingly sing-song. Finally he lifted his head. "Spit it out, Mike. Did you copy the evidence from the Milton case like I asked?"

Mike shook his head painfully slow, and the look on his face - absolutely petrified - was more than enough to tell Harvey that whatever happened wasn't good. It was enough to tell him he'd blown the case without saying a single word.

Mike watched Harvey's face go white; his jaw set. He stood up, dropped the file he was holding on the desk. It hit with a loud thud. Mike flinched.

"The  _hell_  happened?"

It was now or never. Mike knew things could get worse, but he figured he might as well get to worse sooner rather than later. He got it all out in one shaky breath. "I shredded them. Harvey, I'm sorry, I'm really, really sorry, I don't-I don't know-I was so tired, and distracted, and I-"

"You _shredded_  them?"

Mike averted his eyes, which was as good as a nod. Harvey gritted his teeth.

"Go home, Mike."

Mike's heart raced because he knew Harvey's tone meant  _his home_ , not Mike's cheap pot-scented studio. And he wasn't sure he wanted to be at Harvey's place when Harvey actually got there.

He didn't realize he was agonizing over the thought for so long until Harvey said, "Now, Mike. Go home," and started to walk away.

"Where are you going?" Mike called.

"To try to fix your mistake," Harvey replied, spinning around and walking backwards. He tossed up his hands in a combined display of anger and disappointment that hit Mike in the heart. "Where else?"

 

*

 

Mike spent the remainder of the day doing three equally futile things: staring at his cell phone (hoping Harvey might call him with some chance of salvaging the case or at least redemption), crying into the pillows on Harvey's bed, and sitting on the living room floor literally trying to piece together the shredded evidence. Of course, none of these things were doing any good: Harvey never called, crying was useless, and there was no way he could tape together seventy pages of evidence or if it would be legible even if he could. They were supposed to have it ready for the client by eight a.m. the following day, and Mike could feel the deadline almost physically closing in on him.

By eight thirty, he was in the kitchen trying to find all of Harvey's scotch. He didn't want to kill himself yet, not this early into things, but he wanted to get drunk enough that he'd either _forget_  his fuck up or at least be too drunk to worry about what Harvey might  _do_  about his fuck up.

He just managed to pour a glass when the door opened, and Harvey strode in like a well-dressed blur, and slammed the door behind him. Mike froze. He gripped the glass so tight his hand twitched. He'd seen Harvey pass by, go out to the balcony, and then he heard him go into the bedroom. But he hadn't said anything. Mike considered that maybe he was off the hook - not entirely - but that perhaps Harvey's anger in his office earlier would suffice and that their personal relationship might in fact help in Mike's defense rather than hurt it.

No such luck. Harvey came out of the bedroom with greyhound-like speed, shouting at the top of his lungs, like he'd been storing up all of his rage and disappointment and disbelief the entire day, and indeed, he had.

Mike dropped the glass and it shattered onto the tile. "Did you…were you able to fix it?" he asked shyly, cautiously, even though he knew the answer.

"No, Mike, I wasn't able to 'fix it'! Seriously, what the  _hell_  were you thinking?"

"I-don't- _Harvey_ , I don't know-I wasn't-I…"

Harvey flew toward him, stopped inches from his face and the broken glass at their feet. "You weren't  _what_ , Mike, thinking? No kidding. You have  _three seconds_  to tell me how the  _hell_  this happened and it better be a damn good reason."

"Harvey, I-…"

"One…two…"

"I was distracted. I was so tired, I couldn't think, I couldn't concentrate. I got confused. I was thinking about a million things and I couldn't stop, my mind wouldn't  _stop_. I never just  _stops_ , Harvey!"

Harvey seethed and wiped his mouth. He wasn't blaming Mike just to blame him; not just for the sake of yelling at him and cornering him against the counter, but because the kid really had screwed up and Harvey was less than twelve hours away from meeting the client and running out of time. If he didn't come up with  _something,_ then they might as well forfeit; the case was as good as lost.

"Not good enough, Mike," Harvey said, much quieter, of his excuse. He knew that realistically, Mike did have a good reason for his screw up. He'd been pushed too hard, like a pilot expected to fly safely after working seventy-two hours straight - it was as much Harvey's fault as it was Mike's. However, from a professional standpoint, a mistake was a mistake. "You know if Jessica finds out about this, I don't know if I'll be able to protect you."

Mike stood, looking painfully despaired. "Harvey…I'll do anything."

Harvey sighed and looked at his watch. "You have eleven hours and fifty-three minutes, Mike." He nodded to the living room, and to the seventy pieces of shredded paper littering the floor. "Get to work."

Mike had swallowed hard, scoured the remaining part of his brain that was able to still somewhat process information by this point, and tried feverishly to think of a strategy that might make putting the evidence together even a remotely feasible effort. And that was  _without_  the time constraint or the question of whether the client was even going to accept it in that condition.

He leaned over to clean up the mess he'd made by breaking the glass of scotch, but Harvey intervened fiercely, almost pushing him out of the way. "I'll get this," he said, his voice harsh. "Just go…Mike, just go work."

Mike hesitated, and then obediently created a spot between the papers. He'd yet to feel so completely overwhelmed in, well, forever. Even he - the one who tried so desperately and so ardently to do the impossible and continued even when he came up short - knew that this was one fight he wasn't going to win. There wasn't enough time, or enough manpower, or legal leniency in the world to win this one.

Sure enough, ninety minutes passed and Mike and his eidetic memory had yet to even successfully repair two pages. He sighed the kind of quivering sigh that typically precedes tears, except he'd cried them all out earlier. It didn't help matters that he was still wincing every time Harvey walked by, because Mike had a feeling that when he got to that caliber of anger, he was hardly a rung below actually hitting him (which, for the record, he hadn't done and never did, though whatever it was keeping that side of Harvey at bay, Mike didn't know and wasn't readily interested in tampering with).

Harvey took note of Mike's jumpiness, and also of his lack of progress, and eventually wandered over. He sat beside him on the floor. Mike didn't look up, just tried to focus, tried to be  _good._ But Harvey could read it all on his face: the guilt, the exhaustion, the fear, the regret, so he leaned over and kissed his head. And then he helped him.

"I have all of page twenty-six except the part about the November expenses."

"Got it," Mike said. Together, things went a little quicker. But the concept grew more and more daunting until Harvey shook his head, tossed what little they'd accomplished down. He had no idea how to explain this disaster to the client and, at some point, they had to go to court. If they didn't have the original papers in reasonable form by then, they were screwed.

"There's no way I can walk into the meeting with this," he put his head in his hands. His face looked weary and it made Mike feel worse. "Damn it."

Mike stared down, halfheartedly continuing, until Harvey spoke up again.

"Wait a second," he said. His tone was promising; less angry, more cautiously hopeful, like he'd had a light bulb moment.

"What is it?" Mike asked.

"You read these, right?" Harvey pointed to the papers.

"You told me to."

"All of them?"

"It was the first thing you told me to do, Harvey. I read them all. Why?"

Harvey ignored him in favor of standing up, then reached down and patted his shoulder, "Come here, Mike."

Mike scrambled to his feet, followed Harvey into his bedroom where was opening his laptop on the bed. "What are you thinking, Harvey?" he finally asked, suspicion creeping in.

"Just bear with me, Mike. Sit," he pointed to the bed. "You read those papers, Mike. Everything you read is in here," he reached over and gently touched Mike's head.

Mike shook his head wildly. He and Rachel had done something similar before, but it was only a few pages, not nearly as much information, and at the time hadn't been with Harvey or running on so little sleep. "Harvey, I can't-I can't remember."

"Yes, you can."

"Harvey, I can't! I'm sorry, I can't. I can barely think. I can hardly keep my eyes open. I read it and nothing made sense because I was so tired and I couldn't focus."

"But it's still in there," Harvey told him. He moved the computer out of the way so he could close the space between them. He put his hands on his shoulders first, and then under his jaws, lifting his head so their eyes met. "Listen, Mike, you can do this. Just think, okay? Just  _try_. Just try and then we'll sleep. I can't lose this case and I don't want to lose you."

 _Can't lose the case, don't want to lose you._ Mike's heart sank. Shouldn't it have been the other way around? Shouldn't Harvey not  _want_ to lose a case and  _not be able_ to lose Mike? These were the nights when Mike started to figure out exactly where he came out after stacking Harvey's priorities - and it wasn't on top.

Exhausted and glossy-eyed, he caved. Harvey nodded with him supportively, grabbed the laptop and said, "Page one. Picture it, Mike. Picture what it said and read it to me. Like when we first met."

Mike closed his eyes. He had to do it and just _getting close_ wasn't going to cut it this time.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Losing Mike because he screwed up the case would suck for Harvey for many reasons, but only just about as much as losing a bet, or slightly more than misplacing a record. When Mike was there, Harvey dug his claws into him as deep as he could, held him there possessively - figuratively and sometimes literally - and found himself somewhat incensed with the idea that Mike might ever actually belong to someone else. But, when Mike actually  _was_ gone - and not gone in the  _dead_ sense, but gone in the he-was-up-all-night-for-days-on-end-and-now-he-can't-come-in-to-work, or in court alone, or out talking to a witness - Harvey managed just fine. Sometimes he went a few hours without giving the kid a second - or even first - thought. If he lost Mike, it would be collateral damage. He'd find another twenty-something to screw on regular basis. They wouldn't be as pretty and they wouldn't be able to recite the Harvard law books back to him while pinned to the bed, but, you know, there were worse things.

This was a problem.

This was a problem because Mike was three hundred and sixty degrees in the other direction, hopelessly in love, head over feet, completely naïve to, but slowly acquainting himself with, who exactly Harvey really was under all of his good looks and smooth words and false promises and short temper. Mike was in deep and unlike Harvey, Mike didn't -  _couldn't_ \- consider ever putting a case or a client or a meeting or, well,  _anything,_ above or before Harvey. The fact that Harvey didn't exactly feel the same way was starting to affect him, though Mike tried to reason, tried to negotiate, told himself if Harvey loved him half as much as he loved him, then that would be enough. But Harvey didn't. And Mike couldn't just go get coffee without thinking about it. He couldn't take a case or interview a witness without thinking about it. Harvey wasn't out of sight, out of mind for him. Harvey could move on and let go and Mike was incapable of doing either one.

But that's old news. The point is, Harvey recognized the traits of someone who couldn't move on, long before Mike ever started to self-destruct.

_You couldn't have possibly thought we would last, did you?_

Remember that? That was the first and last time Mike surprised Harvey with his inability to let Harvey break up with him and put one foot in front of the other toward the future. From that point on, everything Mike did was a red flag for someone who was going to absolutely  _fall to fucking pieces_ if Harvey kept treating him the way he did. Harvey had a lot of self-control for a long of things. Mike wasn't one of them.

For example, Harvey had the self-control to not lash out at clients or at Jessica (usually). He had the self-control to bluff without flinching, the self-control to hit the gym at six a.m. everyday, the self-control to  _play the man_ when it was so much more tempting to  _play the game._ He had the self-control to not take out his anger on people even when he thought they deserved it. He rarely raised his voice and he never got physical.

'Never' was a very broad and arbitrary word.

Arguably, it was true that Mike brought out both a good side and a bad side of Harvey. For the most part, he was good, because as much as Mike did put him on a pedestal, the kid wasn't a _complete idiot_ and if their interactions from the beginning of their relationship had been  _absolutely horrible all of the time,_ he probably would've gotten the hell out of dodge. But they weren't. Not even close, in fact, which is probably why Mike stayed long enough that, eventually, he couldn't leave, and by that point, it was too little, too late.

The Milton case was an important example of just how much Mike impacted Harvey; how much he affected him and how much he actually altered the variables in his personality that ultimately made him smile or snap. It was an almost malicious process that Harvey hadn't exactly planned, but was aware had been set in motion - yet never really thought about long enough to consider whether or not he should stop it.

 

*

 


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BLANKET TRIGGER WARNING for entire story, for: drug use, major character death, self-harm*, suicide, dubcon*/non-con, coercion, verbal/emotional abuse, language.
> 
> *especially in this chapter

 

*

 

After staying up the entire night and into the morning typing seventy pages of the evidence Mike had shredded, Harvey closed the client – but only just barely, and took a lot of personal flack for the last minute substitute of evidence, and he was 'damn lucky' the client was 'accepting it'. The original documents would eventually have to be pieced together and compared to the typed ones and if there were any inaccuracies, the client would be permitted to reconsider. Harvey had wiped his hand over his face in exhaustion and relief, and went back home to sleep.

He slid into bed, where Mike, so beyond the point of sleep deprivation by that point that he felt like he could actually run a marathon (and then his head would explode), was waiting. He pretended to be asleep, at first, since that was safer than just asking outright about the potentially devastating outcome his actions had caused (Harvey had very pointedly told him  _stay here_ when the alarm had gone off). But Harvey also knew Mike better than that, and knew that his eyes were open even though he was facing the window. He took pity on him after a few minutes of watching his nervous breathing, reached over and ran his fingers through his hair.

"I closed, Mike," he told him, with a  _but just barely and only because I'm the best and it still might come back and bite us in the ass and you still screwed up_ kind of sigh. "Go to sleep for God's sake."

Mike's whole body relaxed; his breathing slowed almost immediately upon hearing the words. He closed his eyes. He was two minutes away from losing his mind completely when Harvey put his arm around his chest and they both fell asleep.

Of course, Mike could catch up on all the sleep he wanted. He was still going to lose in mind in a couple of months.

 

* * *

 

"So, uh, just thought you should know that, uh, your associate is now wasting the firm's time by triple-checking everything that he does."

Harvey scowled as Louis barged into his office.

"Your point, Louis?"

"I just wanted to commend you, Harvey," Louis grinned. "I mean obviously whatever you did to the kid worked better than your tennis hand. He'll never make another mistake in his life."

"Good." Harvey sounded pleased.

"He'll also never  _do_ anything for Pearson Hardman because he's afraid to leave his desk without looking over his shoulder." Louis pointed down the hall and then crossed his arms.

"Listen, Louis," Harvey sighed, swiveled in his chair to look at him, slightly annoyed at having the give the man even fifty percent of his attention. "It's not my problem if Mike doesn't have time to pick up the slack for your associates because he's busy being diligent with his work for me."

Louis scoffed, "You call this diligence? Harvey, this isn't diligence. It's fear."

Harvey rolled his eyes.

"So what was it, huh, Harvey? What'd you do? Tell me why Mike Ross will never make another deadline in his life because in the time it took me walk past his cubicle, he second-guessed himself fifteen times."

"Get out of my office, Louis."

"Come on, Harvey, this is fun," Louis tapped his foot. "Come on, tell me, maybe I can do the same thing to Harold, right? I mean, his work will be late and useless but at least it'll be thorough. Did you threaten his job? Are you withholding his food? I mean, I know the kid is skinny, but my God, Harvey, he's wasting awa—"

" _Out. Louis."_

"Okayfine." Louis turned on his heel and was gone just as fast he'd appeared. He left Harvey in his seat, squeezing his eyes shut, which was usually what he did when he felt the seldom twitch of his conscience kicking in.

.

.

* * *

.

.

Harvey let Mike recover from the week, from his obscene lack of sleep and eating, before he confronted him again about the Milton case. Their two previous fights over it had been less than constructive; had done nothing more than scare Mike into being too afraid to cross the street let alone do his job. Harvey wasn't sure what he hoped Mike would get from another talk – that would undoubtedly escalate into an argument, since it always did – he just knew that he was still pissed off from his embarrassing half-win in the meeting earlier that week.

Mike wandered cautiously out of the bedroom sometime in the evening. A four-hour nap wasn't enough to compensate for the seventy-six plus he'd been in debt, and since they say you can't store sleep, he figured he'd be just as much in the hole in a few days. But he took rest where he could get it.

He stopped just short of the kitchen as Harvey blocked his path, ran a hand up his forearm and held him there.

"How's your mind now, Mike?" he asked.

"The same." Mike replied. He understood why Harvey couldn't just drop the Milton topic – and he knew better than to expect him to – but it didn't mean it didn't annoy him. "Just because I sleep doesn't really mean that it shuts off."

The shorter end of fours hours of sleep wasn't sufficient enough to undo the anarchy that often came with having a photographic memory. And the fact that Mike knew  _Harvey_  knew this, but kept pushing anyway, was the worst part.

"What did I tell you about being a smartass?"

Mike broke free of his grip and snapped, "Not much."

"Tell me how it happened, Mike." Harvey called, gritting his teeth as Mike walked away from him.

"I already  _told you_ , Harvey! The usual way!"

"Yeah? And what's the usual way, Mike?" he followed.

"My mind burns out, Harvey, you know that. You know what happens after I don't sleep and you gave me those papers after I  _told you_ I was tired! What did you expect, Harvey?"

"I  _expected_  you not to fuck it up!" Harvey shouted. He followed Mike until there was nowhere for Mike to end up except with his back a few inches from the wall. "I'm tired every day, Mike. Everyone is tired. Everyone who works hard  _gets tired, Mike._ "

"I'm not everybody, Harvey!" Mike finally shouted so loud that he actually scared them both silent. He glanced left, then right, trying to figure out how to slip away, but Harvey had closed their gap considerably. He could almost feel the disappointment raining down on him, but he couldn't seem to get out from beneath it, and it did something to him, made him feel a level of _worthlessness_  that he felt increasingly incapable of recovering from.

"What?"

"You said everybody gets tired. But I'm not 'everybody'," Mike's eyes watered. He didn't bother fighting it. If Harvey saw him cry, well, he probably couldn't be any more disappointed so he figured it didn't really matter. " _Everybody_  doesn't look at a sheet of paper and memorize everything on it, let alone seventy, and feed it back to you line for line.  _Everybody_  doesn't still remember word for word the McKessen files, or the Bradley files, or the Cannen briefs, or the exact number of the income of the Phillip's merger for the past seven years, and  _everybody_ doesn't look at a situation and see three hundred and seventy six ways to deal with it when all you need is one!"

"Mike…" Harvey put his hands on his shoulders.

"No! You want me to be this…this…. _genius_ , Harvey, you want me to be this  _perfect machine_ and I  _can't_. I just  _can't!_. And I knew I'd screw up the case, and I told you I was too tired, that I was thinking of everything, and then nothing, because I'd just blank out, and you made me take it anyway."

"So this is  _my_  fault, Mike?"

"No," Mike sniffed and turned his head away. "I don't  _know_ what else you want me to say. I said I was sorry a million times."

"I don't want sorry! I wanted you to tell me how it happened so you could tell me how you're gonna make damn sure it never happens again!"

"Can you  _stop_  yelling at me?" Mike's head flew back to face him, angry tears running down his face. "You won, Harvey! Can you  _stop_  yelling at me now?"

"No, no, that's not  _winning,_ Mike!" Harvey shook his head fiercely and pushed Mike against the wall, hard, ignoring him when he cried out. "Staying up all night recreating evidence that our client only accepted because I happen to know someone who knows someone who  _knows_  someone? Getting a preliminary settlement on the condition that every single thing  _you told me_ that _I typed up_ at  _five in the morning_  matches the original  _perfectly,_ or they get a do-over at the firm's expense? That is  _not_ a win, Mike! And if you think it is, if you're content with that? Then I need a new associate."

"Let  _go_."

Harvey ignored him again, overlooked his distress, closed in a little more, gripped his wrists a little tighter. "Look at me," he ordered, and when Mike complied, he finished. "That's not a win. For you and me? That's as good as a loss."

Harvey waited for Mike to agree, to nod, to do something to acknowledge just how unacceptable the outcome had been, that whether or not Harvey had actually managed to  _kind of win_ didn't make his mistake any more forgivable. When Mike didn't respond, when instead he avoided eye contacted and fought against the hands holding him still, Harvey leaned against his neck.

"You get it?" he asked, voice harsh but a whisper at most. He pulled back as Mike finally relented.

"I …get it." he said, somewhat pitifully, voice quiet and fearful.

"Good. Don't ever do that again."

Over Harvey's shoulder, Mike used what was left of his defiance to roll his eyes, even if they watered as he did so. It wasn't the first or second or even third time Harvey had yelled at him about a case, or about  _something,_ it's just that the incidents were becoming more and more routine; a pattern, of sorts. And it  _was_ the first time Harvey had pinned him against the wall (against his will) and it  _was_ the first time he was keeping a cement-like hold on his wrists even when Mike tried to writhe away. It was the first time that Mike was starting to get a little nervous, and not that Harvey would shout or scold or ignore or bet him to Louis or otherwise make him feel like shit, but that he might  _actually physically hurt him._ It shouldn't have surprised Mike very much, and maybe it didn't, since it wasn't a far cry from the emotional pain he'd already started to feel. And there was something inside him that said he should've listened to his gut, to his instincts, just as Harvey twisted his wrists up over his head, pinned them there with one hand. Some kind of voice inside that told him he should have known better, that he was too brilliant to have not seen this coming, that he had only himself to blame for being in the situation at all.

Of course, Mike's brilliance didn't always mean he was any quicker than anyone else when it came to common sense. And while it was true that his heart had gotten the best of him, it wasn't much of a comfort at the moment, as he stood, wrists throbbing, pulse pounding, stripped of control.

Harvey's hand slid up under his old Harvard shirt that Mike was wearing, and then back down.

Mike used all of his weight to try and free himself, cursing as he failed. "Fuck.  _Damn it."_

"Watch your mouth."

Mike rolled his eyes again, a flicker of fear washing over him again when he realized he was completely at Harvey's mercy. And Harvey didn't have any mercy.

"I think..." he gasped. "I'm going home. I'm…I'm tired."

"You just woke up," Harvey said, cutting him off by kissing him.

"I know, but," Mike kissed back, because with Harvey, he didn't know how not to or wasn't sure he could make a good enough case for not wanting to – which was how he was starting to always feel with Harvey if he disagreed with him on anything – like he had to  _make a case_. It wasn't completely fair since Harvey invented the game, made the rules, and adjusted them accordingly in order to always win. "I'm still tired."

Harvey pulled back to look at him, but still kept him pinned. "Why do you need to go home, Mike? You feel bad about screwing up the Milton case so you need to get high?"

"What? No! Harvey, I haven't been—I haven't smoked since Louis made me and that was  _months_ ago!"

Harvey believed him, but watching Mike so desperate to  _know_ he believed him was too good a show to pass up. Plus, if Harvey pretended he was convinced Mike just wanted to leave to get high, then Mike wasn't going to leave. Even if he was scared and it felt like Harvey was about to snap his wrists in half.

"Fine," Harvey said, and suddenly let go. Mike whimpered at the loss of contact and the way his wrists ached. "Go home, Mike," he added, and walked away. He walked away like their entire argument hadn't put a single crease in his day, like kissing Mike in angry passion (or passionate anger?) hadn't affected him at all; like he could've done with or without it, but either way it didn't make too much of a difference. Mike was starting to feel like Harvey's ambivalence hurt him a lot more than his words or his hands.

"I don't want to." Mike called. He half regretted the words the instant he said them. He wasn't sure if he wanted to leave, but he was even less certain that he wanted to stay after what Harvey had just done.

"You know where the door is, Mike. I don't care either way."

Mike shook his head and muttered, "Of course you don't."

 _Idiot._ He called himself all kinds of names on the inside, because how could he be so smart and so stupid at the same time?

He half expected Harvey to fly back over and lecture him or possibly even to slap him in the face for his insolence, but – and again, this hit Mike even harder than he assumed the first scenarios would – he didn't. Harvey didn't respond at all, just leisurely opened the fridge and checked his email on his phone at the same time. Like Mike wasn't even in his apartment. Like he wasn't standing a couple yards away, screaming internally.

"I want to stay." Mike announced, a little louder. He had to be loud with Harvey; loud or defiant – or brilliant – if he ever wanted to get his attention, negative or otherwise. Being obedient and agreeable may have gotten him noticed, but all it had proven to do since then was find Mike falling through the cracks. And he was terrified of being replaced.

"Fine." Harvey said. He tossed up his hand, but kept his eyes on his phone. "Then stay."

Mike was still annoyed – hurt, angry, whatever – by Harvey's lack of interest in whether he left or not, so he continued. "You know, Milton International isn't going to back out of the settlement..."

Harvey sounded bored. "Yeah, and how do you know that?"

"Because, I read those pages, Harvey. And if you typed in exactly what I told you, then everything  _is_ perfect. I fed you everything—verbatim. I didn't miss anything, I swear."

Harvey was watching him now, studying him, wondering exactly what he'd done to – to  _have –_  this person – this  _kid_ – who was so _ridiculously in love_ that he put up with so much shit, that he stayed even when Harvey knew his right brain was probably telling him to  _get the fuck out,_ that Harvey could probably stab him half to death and Mike would apologize for bleeding on his Harvard shirt.

Apparently, brilliance and naivety were not mutually exclusive. Or maybe it was love and not naivety, but Harvey preferred not to think of it that way; denial was a lot easier than responsibility.

He walked over and pulled Mike into an embrace that was a lot less intense than before, much kinder, much gentler – a sort of embrace Mike found comforting those days (but not as much later on, since it forced the realization that Harvey was always capable of being that way, but chose not to be). He ran his hands through his hair, which had become something of a guilty pleasure, and because it did wonders to reassure Mike's illusion that Harvey did in fact care about him. It was a way for Harvey to apologize without actually apologizing, because, you know, he wasn't actually sorry.

Mike buried his face against Harvey's chest, briefly wondered why things couldn't always be like this, before deciding to accept the moment for what it was – fleeting and deceptive – because they might not have another one for several days. He was beginning to be able to predict the unreliability of Harvey's actions.

"I love you." Mike said quietly, after several seconds of counting Harvey's heartbeat. He didn't expect to hear it back, didn't want to, knew it would be a lie. There were things Harvey said, lots of things, that Mike believed, that were in fact lies. But  _I love you_ wasn't something he was prepared to accept without suspicion.

Harvey knew this, and he knew his poker face needed a little work,  _and_ he fully intended to save that line for some other time when he needed it more. When he knew Mike would start getting sick of feeling bad and start standing up for himself, and Harvey could conveniently drop three words on him and know he'd do anything he wanted at the drop of a pin.

So he just said, confidently, "I know."

"Am I that obvious?" Mike pulled away – noting how Harvey let him this time – and smirked. He wasn't damaged to the point of no return yet; he still recovered fairly well from the nature of their relationship and its increasing proclivity for intimidation and indoctrination.

"Obvious?" Harvey gave his shoulder a playful push. "Mike, you're  _transparent."_

They both laughed and, for a few hours, Mike forgot about the other side of Harvey.

.

.

* * *

.

.

Saying  _I love you_  to Mike when he really didn't – at least, not the way Mike loved him – came in handy several times throughout their relationship. It turned what was an increasingly angry, hurt, scared, and emotionally brutalized Mike into agreeable, pliable, whatever-you-say putty in less time than it took Harvey to say  _litigation._  Sometimes he couldn't even believe how well it worked.

Like that day he went to check on him and Mike was working on the Stark briefs and giving him an award-winning attitude.

_The fuck is this, Harvey, a welfare check?_

_You could say that._

Harvey had dragged him into his room and practically thrown him onto the bed, and after futile resistance, Harvey had dropped those three words on him, and suddenly Mike had stopped fighting. He'd just looked into Harvey's eyes with a quiet, childlike hope that seemed to imply that he wasn't completely  _agreeing_ with the idea that Harvey loved him, but he was accepting that if there was a shot in hell, then it was worth laying there and letting Harvey do whatever he wanted. It was like he'd weighed the pros and the cons and it wasn't that Harvey treated him any better or that what he was doing wasn't hurting him, it just meant that as much as he wanted it all to stop, he wanted Harvey to love him back  _more._

When the morning came, it flooded a harsh light on the bed and the situation, and Mike was surprised to see Harvey still sleeping beside him. They'd only used Mike's bed a handful of times, mostly because Harvey was an opportunistic creature, and usually when they did, Harvey was gone before daybreak. Mike glanced at him, and then swung his legs over the side of his bed. He found a lighter under a pile of trash on the floor, and dug a cigarette from the mess on his bedside table. He lit it up, let the smoke burn his lungs, felt the nicotine rush to his head. The sun hit his thighs, danced on and illuminated the irreversible white scars there, like it was intentionally pointing them out; putting a spotlight on one of his many vices. And of them all, this was one he felt entirely helpless to stop. Smoking he could quit. He'd done it before, he and Trevor both had. He'd quit pot before too. Drinking he could live without (maybe that was the problem). The point is, he felt like he had the self-control  _somewhere inside_ to make giving those things up a  _remote possibility._ Cutting was different. It was a compulsion, a coping mechanism, fueled by so many emotions – love, hate, anger, sadness, self-repulsion, despair – that he had absolutely zero ideas as to how he was supposed to get a handle on them long enough to stop doing it. Sometimes he didn't even  _realize_ he was doing it, just found himself in the shower with the water turning red.

Somewhere between his thoughts about cutting, and why the sun was so damn bright, and how he'd already almost smoked his cigarette down to the filter, he heard Harvey sigh and rustle around in the sheets, and suddenly he felt exposed. He pulled his knees to his chest. He didn't need another lecture about cutting, and why he should stop and how easy it is to  _just not do it_ , as Harvey had so eloquently told him – or, rather, screamed at him – a dozen times before, ever since he'd broken the mirror in his apartment.

"Are you smoking again already?" Harvey asked sleepily behind him.

"No." Mike lied. He pressed the end of the cigarette to his skin and watched it fizzle out. He didn't wince.

"Can't even make it to seven a.m. without nicotine." Harvey mumbled and sighed in vague disappointment.

Mike rolled his eyes and rocked back and forth, tried to work up the nerve to ask what he'd been wanting to ask for weeks now, ever since Harvey had started saying he loved him. He was starting to piece it all together, starting to notice how every time Harvey had said it had been just before he'd wanted something from him. Like last night.

"Did you mean it?" he deadpanned suddenly. He swore he could hear Harvey swallow hard in the background.

"Mean what, Mike?"

Mike smiled bitterly because he could always tell when Harvey was stalling.

"You said,  _I love you_ again. Last night. I'm just wondering if you meant it or if you just said it to—"

"Mike, I meant it," Harvey cut him off, sat up, grabbed his shoulder and turned him around. "I meant it, okay?"

"Well, I had to ask, because you told me that you say a lot of things you don't mean. Because you're a lawyer."

Harvey narrowed his eyes, "Not this."

If Mike's brain wasn't starting to catch up with his gut, he probably would've been completely convinced by this point.

"Really?" he pushed, sounding a little numb, which was mostly how he felt, though not quite numb enough that it felt very beneficial; not quite numb enough to dull the pain. "Because it seems like you only say it when you want something."

"Mike..."

"Like when you want me to work overtime on a case, or you want to give me three cases instead of one. Or when you want to fuck me."

_"Mike..."_

"Of course," Mike continued, ignoring the warning in Harvey's tone. "Only if I don't agree first. You always wait to see if I'll do what you want first, and if I put up a fight  _then_ you say it, like it's perjury and don't want to do it, but you will, you'll say it, because it makes it so much easier to deal with me. Because it's less effort than arguing with me or holding me down."

Harvey just stared, for a couple seconds, trying to remember what his game plan was supposed to be after this point, because he'd figured Mike would probably inevitably figure it all out. He usually did, after all, right when Harvey underestimated him. Harvey just hadn't planned so far ahead.

"Mike, listen," he said, shaking his head and laughing – just a little – at Mike's breathless rant. "You're paranoid. I love you. I said it, see? I don't want anything from you."

Mike rubbed the top of his thighs self-consciously and looked back, "Really?"

"Really," Harvey said, pulling him down next to him. "Come here."

He wrapped his arms and one leg around him and lied there silently until he fell back asleep. Mike lied awake, fought his mind for rest – nothing out of the ordinary – and at some point his eyes drifted to the bruises on his wrists, the ones that had darkened overnight, that had turned into purple-grey fingerprints that looked so ruthless they could probably be mistaken for ligature marks. He thought about what Harvey had said and about what Harvey had done.

And then he wondered why, and at what point, Harvey's words had stopped lining up with his actions.

 

*

 

 


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BLANKET TRIGGER WARNING for entire story, for: drug use, major character death*, self-harm*, suicide*, dubcon/non-con, coercion, verbal/emotional abuse*, language.
> 
> *ESPECIALLY IN THIS CHAPTER
> 
> Apologies for medical jargon/drug use/overdose facts that may or may not be grossly inaccurate, but a girl can only Google this stuff for so long before she gets distracted by--oh, what is that?

*

 

Mike didn't cry anymore after he left Harvey's apartment that day. He went back to his own place, stood and observed the state of disarray it was in from the doorway. Since he didn't sleep or eat there anymore (or at all, really) and the place was mostly just somewhere to stash his cocaine or crash when Harvey got too sick of or angry at him, it had become more of a mess than ever. Trash was everywhere, dust had settled, razors and white streaks decorated just about every hard surface.

He walked through it all, uncaring, somewhat emotionless, and immediately got to gathering up all of the coke he and Trevor had gotten in their last score. It was a lot. It had to be, anyway, since he was so reliant on it by this point to even function or ever believe that life was worth living long enough to get to the next moment. But the effects cocaine was having on him were becoming significantly more negative than positive. He'd needed to double the dose just to get high, and still, the feeling – of not being so completely morose that he thought hanging off a balcony was more alluring than life – never stayed around very long before being replaced with the crippling aftereffects of coming down.

But Mike was desperate, even for just that nominal respite, that he was willing to risk it. Someone else wouldn't see the poin, but since he didn't see the point in anything anymore, it all worked out.

He put two full syringes next to each other on the table. In front of those, he lined up six narrow piles of powder. He did it meticulously, cutting each line until it was as perfect as that kind of substance can even get. It frustrated him that the laws of physics didn't coincide well with his brain's desperate insistence on absolute screw-reality perfection. But he didn't show it, just hummed and continued, then sat back to admire his work.

Trevor really would kill him for this. Which wouldn't be necessary.

He leaned over, almost lethargically, lowering his face to the table. With one finger on one nostril, pressing it closed, he used the other to inhale sharply, dragging his face along to make sure he got it all. The first line was gone. Had had it down pat by now. He still gasped and winced.

 _Fuck,_ he muttered, because  _God_ , it burned. It always did. That part never got any better. It felt like someone was taking a nail gun to his sinus cavity and pouring acid in the resulting holes; it fucking hurt. Upon that realization, he figured any normal person would be discouraged by this, but he decided that any normal person wouldn't be sitting there doing it in the first place. He'd fallen so hard from Harvey's penthouse and landed in his third floor should-be-condemned coke corner that he was so far from normal it didn't even matter.

He did it again.

_Fuck._

Again, but this time, the burn was almost welcome, like when he's feeling especially dead inside and reaches into his jeans and claws mercilessly at the cuts there, tearing them open again with the pressure behind his nails, and revels, more than a little, in the fact that he can still feel  _something. Something_ that hurts, but goes away. Something he did to  _himself._ Something he had a  _choice_ in.

The powder disappeared a lot more quickly than the time it'd taken to set it up. Mike took the syringes and sat in front of the couch, knees close to his chest. He thought about how it had felt to sit on the edge of Harvey's balcony, legs swaying recklessly beneath him, as he inspected his arm.

It would've been so easy, he thought, not to jump, but – to just fall. To just lean forward and let go. It would've been fast, swift, instant,  _over, done, gone, finished._ He imagined the peace. It had been so tempting, but he had stalled, waited, given Harvey enough time to drag him kicking and screaming back inside.

He thought about the way Harvey had looked before he'd done that: stricken, helpless. Two expressions that had no business being anywhere near, let alone on, Harvey Specter. But Mike hadn't been able to figure out what they'd really meant at the time, and sitting there on the floor in front of his couch trying to find a decent vein he hadn't yet destroyed, it still wasn't clear. On one hand, he assumed, Harvey was reacting like any normal person might if they woke up to find that the person they were screwing on a regular basis was hanging off a ledge fifteen stories up. On the other, however, Mike wondered if maybe Harvey wasn't just thinking about the professional repercussions for once, and was actually in such concern for and deep opposition of the situation  _because it was Mike._  Perhaps that possibility, no matter how unlikely or how many instances in which Harvey's behavior contradicted it, is what kept Mike stalling; putting it off just long enough for Harvey to slip an arm around his waist and drag him inside, the latter that Mike, if he'd had the energy, might have argued wasn't necessarily any safer, if not, in fact, exponentially more dangerous.

He reached for a syringe, but stopped, hand falling instead on a pen. He had a fleeting moment of clarity in his abject haze of trying to get as much coke into his system before reality caught up to him again, and suddenly, there was something he wanted to say. It was worth stopping for a second to consider not how uncommon this was, but how uncommon is was for him to have the  _chance_  to say it – or in this case, write it down – since most of the time Harvey decided if anything he had to say was important enough to be heard. Typically, that allowed for the repeating of facts, briefs, numbers, salaries, names; anything helpful to work or beneficial to Harvey in general. He was decidedly less interested in Mike's opinions.

Mike found a notebook not far away, on the floor, that he'd used to jot down case notes for work after one of his particularly ruthless overdoses had rendered his memory considerably more average, and he tugged it into his lap. As he wrote, his body warmed, and he wasn't sure if it was from the drugs or if writing was some kind of catharsis; a way to say the things he needed without being interrupted or condescended or dismissed or with fear of someone physically shutting him up.

When he was finished, he shoved the notebook away and hurled the pen into a wall. It turned out none of his words had come out quite as he anticipated. Just forming sentences took a lot more effort than it used to and he realized, if that's what everyone else felt like while writing a note, then he wanted no part of it. He sighed and went back to locating a vein. It wasn't easy, since most of them were hidden beneath thick, healed scars on his arms. He managed, though, probably only because he was used to it. And there was a reliable one on the inside of his elbow that always seemed to hold up, no matter how many times he punctured it, and this occasion didn't seem any different. The needle slid in, blood filled the hub and gave him the all clear; the signal to push.

It was like being underwater. The rush went straight to his brain before he was even finished. In fact, just continuing to inject seemed pointless, since he could feel it all already, but he did it, just to be thorough. And because he had another syringe, waiting, still full and full of promise; promise of sleep, of peace, of apathy toward all of his pain. He was breathing heavy by the time he got the rest of the second one into him, and his vein seemed to have had enough; it collapsed around the needle, skin bruising and blood seeping out around it and trickling down his arm, snaking a thin path around all of his scars and existing track marks. He left it there, sticking out at an angle.

His head fell back onto the edge of a cushion. He could tell it was too much, and he'd known it would be, and most of him had  _hoped_  it would be, though he hadn't done any specific calculations. There was a sick pressure building in his head telling him that hadn't been necessary, and that just doing a  _fucking shit load_ of cocaine was going to do the trick either way. The pressure metastasized; stayed in his brain but travelled to his chest, pushing down without mercy on his lungs, and he gasped. Over, and over; once, twice, six times, hands resting uselessly on the floor while he suffocated, like they were unable or just unwilling to fight for him.

He went through brief seconds of feeling like he might regain control; his limbs would tense, but relax, and he could move them an inch or two, for about three seconds. Nausea spilled over him, and he thought,  _Just throw up, just throw up,_ as if he were simply drunk; like he'd thrown back one two many tequila shots to wash down one too many pills. He'd always either vomited on his own or the hospital had forced him to; either way, he always seemed to do it, and, he'd learned, survived because of it.

But this time he couldn't. He had ethereal, distorted hallucinations of crawling onto his hands and knees and throwing up over and over again, trying to expel all of the poison from him, but all that came up was bile. None of it was in his stomach, anyway, but in his brain, and his bloodstream, so trying to throw up – if he even could have – was as useless trying to fight a grease fire with water. After a moment or two, he'd realize he was still sitting against the couch, neck bent unnaturally, head slumped backward, throat contracting harshly as he tried to breathe.

He was panicking.

The only problem was that it was all internal. None of his panic was producing any physical movement. When he tried to breathe, the most he got were small, inadequate bursts from what felt like a dangerously narrowed trachea. When he tried to stand, the pressure in his head felt like it might make it explode, but either way, he remained sitting. When he tried to lift his arm, nothing happened. When he tried to speak, nothing happened.

The cocaine was doing something to him that it hadn't done before, at least, not this quickly: it was killing him. And he didn't have the presence of mind at that point, or the wherewithal, to regret it, and it was no one's right to speculate on if he would have if he did. But one thing was true: it was instinctive to want to breathe. And Mike wanted to breathe.

He wanted to breathe so bad, more than anything else he'd ever wanted, more than he'd ever wanted to be a lawyer, and more than he'd wanted Harvey, and more than he'd wanted Harvey to love him, and not love him in the controlling, depraved way that he knew Harvey did, but to love him the  _right way, the good way, the normal way, the way that didn't hurt._ He'd wanted all of that so much; so much that he'd always been convinced there was no level of measurement to even do justice to just how much he  _wanted_ it and  _needed_ it. But sitting there in his apartment in a dying, paralyzed heap, with sickness flooding over him in sweaty thousand-pound waves, trembling, with his nervous system ignoring all basic survival chants to take in oxygen, the only thing Mike wanted right then was to breathe. To just  _fucking_   _breathe._ And he tried, not because he didn't want to give up – he did; he was exhausted – but because he didn't know  _how not to fight._ So he tried to breathe.

And he tried.

And tried.

And he couldn't.

.

.

* * *

.

.

Mike woke up in the trauma bay, nothing unusual, on a Sunday. It was six weeks after his first overdose, the one where Trevor had called Harvey after it'd happened. This occasion, however, was a lot more intentional and a lot more serious. It was the third or fourth time he'd done it – swallowed a shit ton of pills and washed it down with eighty proof and drunkenly slashed his wrists as hard as he could – though to be honest, he was losing count. Somehow, though, someone always found him, just in time, and he always came to – barely – in the ER, with a tube shoved down his throat, charcoal filling his stomach while controlled chaos erupted around him. He always found himself struggling to breathe, tunnel vision, choking, trying to sit up but being held down. It seemed like a shockingly accurate precursor to the last time he would overdose, if you believe in that kind of foreshadowing. Mike never gave it that much thought.

In this particular instance, he didn't fall into a coma, but he did wake up again in the ICU. He'd lost several hours, having slipped in and out consciousness between the first floor and the fifth. When he opened his eyes, someone was standing beside him with a penlight, and a clipboard, and it seemed like him waking up was a big deal, though he wasn't sure why. Mostly he met the fact with more than a little bit of disdain. Because someone always had to  _find_  him; always had to  _help_ him. Someone always had to  _intervene_. But no one ever  _found_  him all of the other times, when he was really hurting, when he wasn't numbed out; when he wasn't sliding into a welcome oblivion where there was no pain and where nothing could make him feel so  _awful._ No one ever found him when he was drinking, when he was cutting, when he was doing enough lines to feel so stoned that he was straddling the fine line between dead and alive. And no one ever _helped_  him when he was being lectured on his latest mistake, or when he was up against the wall, with his hands in a vice grip, and no one ever helped him when Harvey was dragging him down the hall and pushing him onto the bed. No one ever helped him when he was scared, when he was terrified, when he was begging, pleading, crying, struggling. No one helped  _then_. No one intervened  _then_.

So Mike didn't understand why everyone felt the need to wrench him from the relief of being gone and throw him ruthlessly back into his life and his seriously compromised wellbeing. It didn't seem hardly as heroic or selfless as everyone seemed to think. In fact, it seemed the other end of the spectrum: selfish, politically correct, and for no reason except to try and right what society considered taboo and wrong and surely it was only the part of society who had never endured what Mike did who even thought it was taboo and wrong in the first place. And he knew, at least in medicine, that action was paramount and beat inaction hands-down, especially in suicide attempts, and no one who had been spared the misfortune of suffering to that caliber could ever understand that some things were, in fact, worse than death.

Death, Mike thought, would be nothing. Not blackness or darkness or light; not good or bad or indifferent. Just  _nothing._ And since the pros and cons of life had long-since leveled, and the good had begun to wane, he could use a little nothing. He could use a  _lot_  of nothing.

But, until he could figure out how to get it, it wasn't up to him. Until his attempts at finding the peace of  _nothing_ weren't only random nights of despair and impulsive, ill-timed, unplanned races to poison himself to death, it wasn't going to be up to him. And he was always going to wake up in the hospital. And  _nothing_ , he realized, was one more thing that he would only ever get  _close_  to.

He had to face it. As long as he was still alive, he had to live, or at least, exist. It was unavoidable. He had to sit up, assisted, and be asked simple questions and wonder why they were in fact so difficult to answer.

_Can you tell me your name?_

"…Mike…Ross?"

Was he asking? Or answering? He waited to see if someone would confirm his identity on his behalf, because while the name had come out of his mouth, it felt vaguely unfamiliar and generic. He knew  _who_  he was; where he lived, and where he worked, and why he'd picked up a razor and a bottle of vodka and fistfuls of anti-depressants, but his name…his name escaped him. Mike thought they were asking entirely the wrong, most irrelevant questions.

_How old are you?_

"Twenty…" Mike frowned. He was twenty-something. Wasn't that good enough for these people? But when the doctor in front of him looked bleakly satisfied with his answer, Mike suddenly realized that wasn't a good thing. Their expectations were low. They didn't expect him to know anything. They'd expected him to say his own name like it was a question and they expected him to only just barely recall what decade his age was in. He struggled to prove them wrong, biting his chapped lips and squinting like it might dredge some information from his brain that seemed depleted of basic and numerical facts. Finally, he, finished, "Four. Twenty-four."

The doctor looked a little hopeful.

_And where are you now?_

"The hospital," Mike said. That question was little easier, after all, he'd been there enough times.

A nurse adjusted his I.V., the machines around the bed, and before they left, asked him if he wanted a visitor. He just shrugged. Who would even come to see him who hadn't been compelled to only because they were indirectly the reason he was there to begin with?

When Harvey walked in, expressionless and silent, Mike wasn't really surprised. There was a mild anger that ran through him when Harvey took the chair beside him, but it was passing, exhausting, and quickly replaced with the strange feeling of relief, of  _it's okay now_ , because he didn't have anyone else, and as bad as Harvey treated him, he wasn't sure he'd readily pick someone else anyway, even if he'd had the chance.

At first, neither of them said anything. They looked at each other, then looked away, then back, all in silence. Finally, Harvey held up a bottle of water.

"I brought you this," he said quietly. "If you want it."

Mike did want it; he wanted it a lot. He mouth was six hours past being just dry and between the liquor and the stomach pump, he felt like he'd swallowed razors. So he nodded, a little more eagerly than he'd intended, because he couldn't help it, because he was  _so thirsty._ There was just one problem.

Harvey twisted the cap off and held the bottle over the railing of the bed. Mike looked at him, eyes darkening like Harvey was mocking him, lifted his hands up to demonstrate how they stopped after just several inches; how the soft restraints wrapped around his wrists snapped them right back down again. He felt re-victimized; he didn't associate being pinned down with anything good. It traumatized him in a brand new way.

To his right, Harvey sighed. He looked at the restraints, and it seemed liked he was considering taking them off, but hesitated and thought better of it. But not because he thought it was against policy – because Harvey didn't really give a shit about policy – he simply happened to agree that they were there in the first place for a good reason: to keep the situation from getting any worse.

He leaned against the bed, slid his hand behind Mike's head and pushed it forward a little, so he wouldn't aspirate. He pressed the water bottle to his mouth and tilted it back. Mike drank fast and desperately and Harvey had to pull it away to keep him from choking. He was so relieved to drink, to quell his dehydration, that he looked at Harvey gratefully for a long time, like he'd never been angry with him, and he wasn't afraid of him, and he was nothing but thankful that he was there, that he was beside him, giving him water, like that was all that mattered. Of course, it faded eventually, and appreciation reverted back into borderline apathy with alternating instances of forgiveness and hostility…though mostly the latter.

Harvey talked at Mike for a while and Mike didn't respond very often, unless he really wanted to, because the hospital was a safe zone of sorts, much like the work was: Mike could do whatever he wanted, or not do what he didn't want, and there wasn't a lot Harvey could do about it, no matter how pissed off he got. Of course, it was more or less an illusion; with bright lights and activity and lots of people of no mal-intent within earshot, but it was all very temporary. Just like Mike didn't stay at work forever, he wouldn't stay in the ICU forever either, in fact, this time for less than a day. None of it lasted all that long. Harvey's anger, however, didn't seem to have an ending.

When Harvey mentioned something about how the doctor had said he was willing to release him, it was the first thing that Mike found worthy of answering. It was the first thing that gave him the incentive to roll his head to the right and face Harvey again since drinking the water. But it wasn't the first thing that made him  _feel._ Everything Harvey said did that; all of the lame bullshit about what was going on at work, to distract Mike from the mess he'd made or whatever responsibility Harvey had in it all. Even some stupid, petty comment about the healthcare system made Mike feel  _something,_ for no other reason than because it was Harvey who said it. He wondered if there was anything at all that Harvey thought of differently, or felt differently about, for no other reason than because  _he_  was the common denominator. Part of him wanted to ask. Part of him didn't want to know.

"I can leave?" he asked instead, because it was so much simpler.

Harvey nodded slowly, "Yeah, I guess you passed their tests. They'll let you go tonight."

Mike breathed quietly and Harvey continued.

"But they're not going to let you sign yourself out," he explained. "If you want to leave, you're going to have to come home with me."

"And if I stay?"

"You get put on a psych hold again."

Mike shook his head bitterly at his options, but a stabbing pain made him wince and stop. "So," he said, but he wasn't looking at Harvey anymore. He was just staring straight ahead. "My choices are, I can go home with you…"

Harvey nodded. Mike could see him from the corner of his eye.

"…or," he continued. "I can spend seventy-two hours in the psych ward."

Harvey nodded again, slowly, in confirmation.

"Wow," Mike laughed, and then stopped, very suddenly, face going still and dark and hurt and angry, turned to the right and shouted,  _"Both of those CHOICES SUCK, HARVEY!"_

It was Harvey's turn to wince now. He clenched his jaw and nodded, because he agreed, because he knew they sucked, because he knew the mental health system was so painfully broken and yet, taking Mike home was probably not in his best interest either. But it was all he knew to do.

Mike wasn't very interested in recovery at that point – it slipped further out of reach each day – and he resented his choices for different reasons. He hated Harvey and he hated being in the hospital and the only deciding factor was that he also loved Harvey but he didn't also love the hospital.

"Why don't you give me another one?" he asked sarcastically; miserably. "Like, third, I get to walk across hot coals? Or there's always waterboarding."

The fact that Mike was comparing being with him to barbaric forms of war torture did something to Harvey, though he wasn't sure what; couldn't tell if upset him or angered him or offended him or hurt him, or did a little bit of all of that. Either way, he pushed it down in favor of sighing heavily.

"You can come with me or you can get admitted," he said, standing up. His voice rose a little, with a little warning, a little impatience. "That's it, that's the deal, end of story. It's not up for debate."

Mike's face fell, contorted into an angry pout, eyes full of contempt that Harvey knew would eventually go away; a hug, an  _I love you,_ a  _Good boy,_ and he'd get over it. Mike tried to roll over, but he couldn't so he settled for wrenching his head to the other side so he couldn't be seen. He felt a wave of anxiety course through him, through his body, his brain, threatening to strip him of whatever was left of his sanity. He could feel Harvey standing impatiently beside the bed, waiting for an answer.

"What's it gonna be, Mike?" he asked. "What do you want to do?"

Mike's eyes watered, tears rolled down his face and soaked into the pillow. He was so angry, mostly that they'd done such a good job of forcing all of the anti-depressants out his system that he was able to feel emotion this much in the first place. It was the opposite of what he'd wanted. And on top of that, he didn't understand how even when Harvey was  _asking_ him something instead of  _telling_ him, it  _still_ sounded more like an order, and he  _still_  didn't feel like he had much of a say in it. It was a no-win; a lose-lose. It always was. One step forward, ten steps back. He overdosed, they revived him. He pushed, Harvey pushed harder.  _Lose-fucking-lose,_ he thought.

"Home," he managed to choke out. "I want to go home."

"Fine," Harvey said. "Then tell them that and get your shit together. I'll come back and get you tonight."

Harvey walked out. Mike laid there, squirming against the restraints, looking for the best angle to bury his face into his pillow and cry.

And cry and cry and…

 

*

 

Harvey was the closest thing Mike had to family. It wasn't like his grandmother was in any shape to take care of  _him_ anymore,and besides, as terrible as he felt for it, he couldn't remember the last time he'd gone to see her. He tried to feel better by telling himself she probably hadn't noticed. It was a lie, but it tempered the pain a little.

In addition to being some kind of acceptable kin, Harvey was also an expert negotiator. Mike didn't really know how he was able to sign him out, but the fact that he managed to didn't surprise him. A few hours and some paperwork later and Mike was free of the restraints, the I.V., and in the change of clothes Harvey had brought him.

While Harvey was down the hall finalizing his release, Dr. Freeman walked into Mike's room. There was a nurse nearby, Mike guessed for the sake of him not trying to kill himself before he left, and Freeman nodded for them to leave.

Mike was putting on his socks, doing it very carefully, very gingerly, because his whole body was sore. Everything hurt: his stomach from the liquor and the pills and acid and charcoal, his throat from the tube, his head from the drugs, his wrists from the razor. Everything just  _hurt._ Even his bones ached; his very core, from the depression. He felt like if he did anything too quickly he might just shatter from the pain alone.

"Hi," Alex said.

Mike looked up and gave him a weak smile, because he didn't know why he cared about him, but he was kind of thankful that he did. He was also more than a little suspicious too, which was understandable, since he wasn't used to anyone giving a damn about him without some kind of ulterior motive.

"How are you feeling?"

"Uh. Fine," Mike's voice was small and distant.

"I suppose you're not going to thank me for the stomach pump," Alex was trying to lighten the situation a little, but the joke fell flat under the gravity of it.

Mike looked at him for a second and then said, simply, "No."

"That's understandable," Alex said, nodding apologetically. "Look, I'm confident that you're going to get better, Mike, and I think that you're going to get help here, upstairs."

"I'm not going upstairs," Mike snapped, though his anger was less at Dr. Freeman and much more at himself. "I'm going home."

Alex looked confused and concerned. Letting Mike go, in his medical opinion, was like abandoning a bomb and waiting for it to detonate. But before he could say anything, Harvey appeared in the doorway. He looked past Alex, if not directly through him.

"Mike, you ready?"

Mike looked up at him from his shoe and nodded, "Almost," he called.

"Well, hurry  _up_ ," Harvey looked down at his watch. "I have to back to the office on the way home. I forgot something."

Mike tied his shoe quickly, but it was enough time for Harvey to be forced to acknowledge the other man in the room.

"Mr. Specter," Alex said dryly.

Harvey nodded once, eyes steely and resentful, "Dr. Freeman."

It was tense as it always was; as it had been since the first time they'd met. No signs pointed to it getting better any time soon. Mike couldn't stand it; it was like putting the pressure cooker he was already in inside of another one. It was too much. He kept his head down.

"Mike tells me he's going home?"

"He is," Harvey answered firmly, giving Alex an annoyed look before turning to Mike and raising his voice. "If he gets his damn shoes on sometime this year and I don't leave without him."

Mike didn't look up, just grabbed his other shoe and tried to put it on as fast as he could, fumbling and getting flustered. Alex watched him and noted that it looked not only like he'd been crying, but that he might start again any second if Harvey kept yelling at him.

"I don't think that's a good idea," Alex told Harvey. He turned his back to Mike, but their voices were still audible. "In fact, is that even  _legal?"_

"Everything I do is legal," Harvey replied confidently. "I'm as close as he has to family. I'm legally allowed to sign him out."

"Against medical advice," Alex corrected.

"Be that as it may," Harvey shrugged. "Still allowed to do it. Now if you'll excuse us…"

Alex leaned in, lowered his voice a little, "He should go upstairs to psych and you know it,Specter."

"He doesn't  _want_  to."

"He also didn't  _want_ to survive this, but he did. So I think we can all agree that what he  _wants_ is a little distorted!"

"Well," Harvey said. "Since it helped so much last time…"

"That's not the point," Alex whispered, glancing over his shoulder at Mike, who had finished putting his shoes on was waiting obediently for them to finish talking. He turned back to Harvey. "It will keep him safe."

"I can do that just fine," Harvey nodded tersely.

"I really think he needs to stay." Alex argued, because he knew what was going to happen if he sent Mike home. Maybe not right away, but soon, he was going to overdose again and no one was going to find him in time and all of Alex's efforts were going to be in vain. Because he'd treated the depressed before, and he'd treated addicts, and cutters, and the suicidal, and he knew the psychiatric protocol was flawed but that it was Mike's best bet at that point.

"You know what? Why don't you go back to the ER where you came from?" Harvey was done. He'd reached his point where he couldn't put up with any more holier-than-thou bullshit and as far as he was concerned, a J.D. beat an M.D. any day. "He doesn't  _want_ to stay, thenI'm not going to make him."

"Yeah," Alex scoffed. "Because you never make him do anything he doesn't  _want."_

His words were a little louder than intended, and hit the air just as Harvey fell silent, and the music on the overhead speakers stopped temporarily, and much of the white noise of distant phones and talking came to a brief pause. It made what he'd said that much more audible, piercing the quietness and bounding off the walls. Even Mike had heard it loud and clear.

"The hell does that mean?" Harvey asked.

Alex just looked at him spitefully, but didn't push it. He wasn't interested in a physical altercation or in saying anything else that he might regret if Mike overheard.

Harvey shook his head, like Dr. Freeman was the dumbest person he'd ever encountered and hadn't actually rattled him one bit. He looked across the room.

"Let's go, Mike."

Mike shot up at the order and followed, stopping suddenly when two arms grabbed him. One was a tight, possessive grip on his right arm, the other a gentle, humane hold on his left. He froze, looked at Harvey, then back at Alex, and the two seemed to be in a cold, perilous staring contest.

" _Let. Him. Go."_  Harvey warned, and Mike could see the dangerousness in his eyes. It was the same kind he got whenever Louis stole him for half the day – or an hour, or a minute – only it was on a much, much more intense level. It was almost deadly.

Alex wanted to let go, he did, but he was in the middle of one of the biggest moral dilemmas of his career thus far. His crisis of conscience over letting Mike go home with Harvey or trying desperately to think of a way to keep him on a psych hold was killing him. And the fact that it found them both in a literal tug-of-war with Mike by the doorway was proof.

"Mike?" Alex looked at him and tried to ignore Harvey's death glare. "Do you want to stay and get help?"

Mike didn't answer, just looked up with wide, terrified blue eyes and then looked back down. He had no idea what to do. There was no guarantee that if he did he'd even have the spine or courage to stand up to Harvey anyway. His heart pounded nervously. He just wanted someone else to make the decision while he burst into tears again. It was too much. It was all too much.

Fortunately, or unfortunately as the case might be, Harvey didn't respond well to someone touching or threatening to take away what was his, so the situation didn't drag on for more than ten or so seconds before he jerked Mike's arm and dragged him out of Alex's grip. He put a hand on his back and shoved him out the door.

" _Go,_  Mike, let's go," he ordered, turning to give Alex one more glare.

"I could report that." Alex threatened, though he knew that realistically, it wouldn't do any good. He had no proof of any wrongdoing, no admission, no accusation; just a hunch and  _he said, he said._  In other words: no case at all. Harvey knew this, better than anyone, and immediately called his bluff.

"You won't report  _shit,"_  he said, and then put his hand on Mike's shoulder and walked off toward the elevators.

.

.

* * *

.

.

If Mike was making any strangled sounds while he sat suffocating on his floor, he wasn't aware of it. He couldn't hear much of anything, save for a distant whistling sound – his phone, maybe – as his vision started to go, started to fade from white to grey to black. The brief seconds where his vision returned were just that: brief, and fleeting, immediately replaced by brightness or darkness. He couldn't feel much, either, as though all of his senses were dying off slowly. First his hearing, then his sight, and after several violent episodes where he could tell that he was seizing – because his legs and arms were rigid and flexed against all control or reasonable bending expectation and because his tongue was crushed, bloody and hopelessly, between his teeth – he stopped feeling that, too. Which in a way, was a relief. It was one less pain he had to deal with; one more reality that was slipping away. It also meant that  _he_  was slipping away, one step further to never feeling it or anything else ever again, and he was too far gone – too high, too strangled, too suffocated, too sick – to have an opinion about it.

His brain had gone far too long without air; every part of him was so grievously in debt of oxygen that his heart had no alternative except…to stop. To stop beating. To stop pumping blood to his brain so it could tell his lungs to breathe – which it had been doing a pretty lousy job of already. But now it wasn't even trying. It just stopped.

He was dead weight, although not much of it, and his body crumbled over to the side, folding into a disgustingly underfed, hacked-up heap. His chest had stilled and only the miniscule, agonal twitching of his hands was evident. But he didn't know; couldn't feel it. To know something, after all, to  _feel_  it, you had to be there. And he wasn't there anymore.

.

.

* * *

.

.

The ride home from the hospital that Sunday was quiet. Not awkwardly so, but  _tense_. Mike didn't even realize how afraid he was of asking any questions until it was too late and he already had.

"I thought you had to stop by the office?"

Harvey shifted gears harshly and Mike flinched.

"It's not important," he said softly. "I'll worry about it tomorrow."

Mike just settled back into his seat, feeling, not out of the ordinary, like an inconvenience. But when he looked over at Harvey, passing street lights illuminating his face two seconds at a time, he noticed that he didn't look angry. He looked just looked tired.

Mike didn't know if this made him feel better or worse.

He was still trying to figure it out when they got to Harvey's place, when he crawled into bed and tried to sink deep enough into it in hopes that it might just swallow him up entirely and he wouldn't have to deal with anything anymore, not feelings or consequences or  _anything_.

He laid there awake for a while, body vying for sleep, mind preoccupied with everything but, and watched as Harvey walked around suicide-proofing the apartment. It was ridiculous and probably obsolete, but it was the thought that counted, he guessed, or something.

First, he heard him rummaging around in bathroom, and, he assumed, stashing away all of the aspirin and sleeping pills, like he'd done the last time. Harvey then poured his favorite scotch down the kitchen sink and rigged the doors to make lots of noise if they were opened, though he was pretty sure he would be awake the whole night anyway.

Mike rolled his eyes at the display, but held onto a pillow tightly to remind himself that he was happier there than strapped to a gurney in the hospital; lesser of two evils and all that. Harvey saw and walked over to join him.

The bed dipped under his weight and he leaned across toward Mike, pushing his hair back over and over. He was quiet, at first, then said, "How many more times do you think you're going to beat the odds, Mike?"

Mike was quick on his feet, "I was hoping never."

Harvey cocked his head to the side, mildly impressed but trying his best not to show it.

"Fine," Mike said. "But as much as I'd love to recite the statistics for you, I can't remember. Apparently I fried my freak brain last month when I drank your bottle of Talisker."

"You still owe me for that, by the way."

"Dock my pay."

"Don't tempt me."

Mike laughed and hid his face in the pillow. When he stopped and looked up, Harvey was still running his hand through his hair, only his expression was less playful and more staid.

"Mike…" he sighed, and it was so overdue, the sound, because he was so  _tired._ "I don't know what to do about this."

Mike swallowed hard, winced from the day's events, and looked down; at the sheet, Harvey's chest, his hands, anywhere but his face; anywhere but his eyes. He tried to think of an answer for him, a good one, like he'd always been able to find for everything else he needed: a solution, a fix, a loophole, but he  _couldn't_. He couldn't think beyond the most elementary of responses and Harvey's voice in his head seemed to drown out even that. There was something about the way he said his name, and it wasn't spectacular, not even something Mike could pinpoint, he just knew it was there. He knew it was there because no matter how upset he got, or angry he got, or betrayed he felt, if Harvey said his name that way, Mike would forgive him, concede, give in, obey – bury the hatchet again and again and again.

He half wanted to tell Harvey to save him, that he could still  _be_  saved, that he deserved to be, wanted to be, and that he wasn't a hopeless case. He wanted to beg him to keep trying, not to give up on him, not to throw in the towel. But none of that sounded like a good idea, and he doubted whether or not he was worth any of the effort Harvey had already exhausted on him, and he doubted even more that Harvey cared enough to put forth any more.

So, ashamed, he replied with the only other thing that came to him, which was also the truth.

"Me either."

.

.

* * *

.

.

Harvey could count on one hand the number of times he'd ever actually been speechless before in his life, as in,  _completely without words; unable to speak._ Whatever the others had been, he thought that feeling that way in the back of an ambulance had just assumed first place.

The vehicle was loud, sirens blaring, creaked and slammed with lousy shocks over storm drains, and the EMT driving seemed emphatically too young or too reckless or both. But in her defense, they hadn't crashed yet and were making excellent time.

Harvey sat, feet splayed to keep from flying forward on every turn. His face was sickly white, but he looked surprisingly alive and healthy in contrast to the ominous blue tint on Mike's face, as he lay on a stretcher in front of him.

A paramedic who looked hardly any older than Mike himself was shocking his heart. Over and over and over in a hail-Mary to restart it. Harvey had managed to do that once, when he'd first walked in and found Mike, rolled him onto his back and pumped his chest, snapping his rips but getting a heartbeat, however fleeting. Still, CPR seemed suddenly somewhat less vicious than watching the way Mike's body jolted from the shocks. But Harvey was out of his element, so all he could do what shut up and watch.

It took eight-three seconds to get to the hospital. In those eighty-three seconds, Mike's heart started and stopped four times.

By the time he was in a trauma room and Alex Freeman was taking over, Mike's heart hadn't beaten reliably for more than nine seconds in over forty-six minutes. Freeman wasn't a veteran but he'd been a doctor long enough to know that even if they got Mike back, they wouldn't get Mike back. His mind would be gone; not in small, incremental losses, but entirely, completely _gone_. His toxicology screen was off the charts, literally. Most of his organs were failing fast; his kidney values were through the roof. His brain was toast. His heart was well on its way.

Whether or not Freeman was taking it personally, or if he was emotionally invested enough to push on a little longer, or if he was just being thorough – giving chances even if they wouldn't make any difference – or if it had anything to do with guilt or trying to compensate for feeling that he hadn't helped enough before and that it was somehow his fault, because he'd  _seen this coming,_ well, he didn't know. But every time he thought of calling time of death, he stalled.

He stalled for thirty-seven minutes, pushed fluids and atropine and adrenaline and nitroglycerin and repeatedly shocked him at varying degrees of charge, but nothing changed. His condition stayed the same: same blue pallor on his face, around his lips, same consistent flat line on the heart rate monitor, and it all seemed to shout the same thing, which was, that help had come too late, too late, too late.

_Time of death, 11:41AM._

Harvey couldn't hear him say it, but he knew that he had, and stepped out of the way just in time for Freeman to shove the door open and storm past him without a single look. Harvey ignored it, inched closer to the fading activity in the room, every step more like lead than the last.

And when he finally got close enough to look at Mike's body, his mind presented a question, infinitely more haunting than any other, which was: too late by minutes,

Or by months?


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BLANKET TRIGGER WARNING for entire story, for: drug use, major character death, self-harm, suicide, dubcon*/non-con*, coercion, verbal/emotional abuse*, language.
> 
> *especially in this chapter.

*

Mike decided to test his theory that Harvey only loved him in a very sick way and on a very conditional basis, which seemed to contradict the very definition of love, though Mike wasn't certain, since he'd never felt it before.

One day, he walked into the office and told him he wasn't going to take on the Rivers case or the Clarkfield pro-bono either, because he was up to his neck with the Steer briefs as it was. He disposed of the files on Harvey's desk with an ungraceful thud.

"Too busy with the Steer briefs," he announced. "Sorry, not doing these."

"Yes, you are."

"I guess you didn't hear me," Mike said. He sounded surprisingly confident at work those days, even when he was talking to Harvey, because hadn't completely fallen apart yet, and being there gave him a somewhat valid (though brief) sense of safety. "I'm not doing them, Harvey. I don't have time and I don't want to screw up again. And you can tell me to do them, you can order me to, but I won't. And you can take me in the file room, if you want, and kiss me and say you love me, but I'm still _not doing them._ "

Harvey was annoyed, but also amused at Mike's willingness to put his foot down. It was cute. "You're only talking to me like this because we're at work, Mike."

"And you're only keeping your cool for the same reason," Mike fired back. "You're pissed off and you know it, and you're only still sitting down right now because we're not at home, and there's too many witnesses and not enough walls."

"Do the damn cases, Mike," Harvey said, glaring up dangerously. He flicked the stack of files.

"No."

"You know what? Do them, don't do them, I don't care. They're for Jessica, not for me. But if you're not going to, then I suggest you walk down to her office and let her know. Because you're the capable associate whose hands she requested they be put in. And I'd really hate to see her in the morning if these aren't on her desk tonight. Wouldn't you?"

"You're bluffing."

"Maybe I am," Harvey shrugged. "Maybe I'm not. Why don't you leave them here, find out tomorrow?"

Mike huffed, "Forget it," he said. He grabbed the files – all of them – and stormed out. "You win."

.

.

.

.

Mike was standing in Harvey's living room, looking at the coffee table that was stacked with papers he had left to go over from the Steer case that he, of course, got behind on while trying to finish up the other two that, of course, turned out to be for Harvey and not Jessica. Of course.

He was still standing there when Harvey wandered over, slid his arms around his waist and chest and pulled him back against him, tight.

"Scared?" he asked, when Mike flinched more than a little. He was starting to consider that it might more appropriately qualify as an actual jump.

"No."

"You're a horrible liar. We need to work on your poker face."

"Maybe you could just help me work on the case, instead," Mike suggested. "Since it's your fault I'm behind now."

Harvey nipped at his neck, "Are you trying to piss me off again, Mike? Because look where we are. No witnesses. Lots of walls. I should throw you against one for what you said in my office today."

Mike scoffed, "But you won't." There was false bravado in his tone – calling Harvey's bluff never worked out too well for him since Harvey always followed through on his threats.

"How do you know?"

"I just do," he gave it a shot anyway. "Plus, it's playing dirty. Like badgering the witness."

"Badgering the witness doesn't work because it angers them. It doesn't scare them."

"So, you're trying to justify using fear as a motivator? In that case," Mike started to recite, from memory and an old law book, "Fear as a tactic is vindictive and ineffective..."

Harvey put his hand under Mike's jaw and tilted his head back, so it was resting on his shoulder, exposing his neck. "Ineffective? I think it depends who you're using the tactic on."

"A witness, client, jury..." Mike rattled off, though it was difficult to talk with Harvey's mouth on his throat. "I don't think it matters. People don't usually respond to fear with honesty, leaving their actions and answers – if any – unreliable. Which is why it's ineffective. And it's cruel, which is basically the same as vindictive."

"But," Harvey countered, letting go of Mike's jaw and running his hands up his chest. "What if you don't need honesty? What if you all you need is compliance? _Then_ is fear a good tactic?"

"Maybe," Mike replied. He tensed under Harvey's touch – it was rough and spiteful. "But it's still unethical."

Harvey yanked Mike's shirt over his head before he could object. "I always hated ethics," he said. "Seriously, my least favorite class in undergrad. I think I got an A minus."

"I'm sure you broke an academic sweat," Mike snapped. "Give me my shirt."

"Not really." Harvey laughed, and when Mike reached for his shirt, he grabbed hold of his wrists instead. "No shirt."

"Let _go!"_ Mike said, but his voice didn't hold up like it had earlier in Harvey's office. It faltered quickly under the duress. "I have to finish the Steer files. I'm not doing this."

"Oh, you're not _doing_ this? Just like you weren't _doing_ the Rivers and the Clarkfield cases? Give me a break, Mike. You do _what_ I say, _when_ I say it, one way or another," he pulled Mike against him by his wrists, kissed him slowly, and then said, much softer, "Come on. I love you."

Mike wanted to believe him. He really, really did. He wanted to relent, wanted to give in, wanted to kiss him back, forget the bad, move on with the good, wanted to pretend that the side of Harvey that really did give a shit about him existed in more than just fleeting moments on fleeting days. But he couldn't, not quite, not this time, because it hurt too much. He thought about everything Harvey had said, and everything he'd done, and how he was always either angry or cavalier about Mike's existence, and he thought about his wrists and how they probably couldn't turn any darker, that maybe this time they'd just break, and when he thought about all of that, he couldn't give in. He couldn't melt into Harvey's arms and pretend none of it was true. He could just stand, rigid and unwilling, and try to make a case.

"No you don't," he said, meek. "Not really."

Harvey sighed, spun him around and pushed his hair back. "I do, Mike. But if you don't believe me, you don't believe me."

"I don't believe you because you say one thing and you do another, Harvey! You say you love me, then you give me eight billion cases to work on. You say you love me, then I leave for ten minutes and you forget I exist. You say you love me," Mike looked down at his arm, still encased in Harvey's right-hand grip. "And then you do this."

Harvey concentrated on his breathing, pressed their foreheads together, tried to stay calm despite Mike's impressive summary of a man whose actions quite clearly contradicted his words. "You didn't used to fight me on this, Mike," he said quietly, sliding his hand behind Mike's belt.

"It didn't used to hurt," Mike said, but his voice barely registered, seemed to die as it hit the air. His whole body tensed.

Harvey stopped. He considered Mike's words, wondered how much truth there was to them. Which isn't to say that he thought all that much about it, or that he'd have changed if he did, but he liked to think he would've. He liked to tell himself he wasn't that impossibly cruel. If there was anything he admitted to, to himself, it was that he was tough, but fair. And maybe—maybe— _coercive_. Maybe he _coerced_ Mike into doing a lot of things, but he was convinced he never strayed too close to force. Unfortunately, the line between the two was thin, blurring quickly, and Mike was having a difficult time telling the difference.

There was a nauseating sensation of mild guilt twisting around in Harvey's stomach and he changed the subject in an attempt to make it go away. "When are you going to finish these?" he asked, nodding toward the files on the table.

"Tonight," Mike promised, a little confused, but he stayed and waited for the worst. When it didn't come – when Harvey let go of him, just said 'Good' and walked away – Mike took a deep breath, ran into the bathroom and locked the door behind him.

He turned on the faucet, sat down on the floor and cried.

.

.

.

.

It would serve no purpose to fully anthologize every day or week or month. It would be redundant; you know – same song, different verse. Another fight, another mistake, an hour of the cold shoulder, Harvey treating everyone else like they had the capacity to be hurt while treating Mike like it didn't matter if he did or not. It was another day of disappointment, desperate need for validation that Mike got soclose to getting but always seemed to fall short of. Another night of no-means-yes, crying, arguing, sitting against the bathroom wall carving open his legs because it was so much easier to deal with the kind of pain that was physical; the kind that he could see and touch and that eventually went away.

It was a new boxcutter blade he'd swiped from work, it was Harvey's bathroom, it was Saturday. He swore he'd had enough. He was two weeks into snorting cocaine, and it was almost a daily occurrence, though here-and-there stalled in part by the infrequent escapes he was able to make to his own apartment. He hadn't started injecting it yet. Sucking it up his nose seemed to be holding him over for now, though he'd eventually notice that the high came on fast but was gone even faster.

Of course, it was hard to snort coke in Harvey's apartment, and when Mike came down off of it the last thing he wanted to do was face the level of anger and disappointment that would undoubtedly await him if Harvey were to find him in that condition in _his apartment_ or if Mike had the audacity to bring the drugs there in the first place.

But on Saturday he was somewhat trapped. His bike was at work. He couldn't walk that far. His whole body was sore, and whether or not it was from cocaine or Harvey was a toss-up. He just knew that if he didn't do something to at least try to cope with the impending dread he felt, the complete lack of feeling that had somehow evolved into a feeling itself – and a terrible one, at that – he was going to lose his mind for good. He had to do something about the battle he was waging with himself; something to free himself from the weight he felt was suffocating him, something to numb him to that absolutely _empty, worthless, useless, unwanted, unloved, used, discarded, bruised, damaged_ feeling.

 _Something_ was cutting. He couldn't remember how he ended up on the cold tile in Harvey's oversized bathroom – back against the wall, knees in front of him, silver blade in his right hand – but he had, which was all that really mattered. He'd been doing it for a while now – at least longer than the cocaine – so he had a steady hand, made deep, decisive cuts, one after another, in descending lines from the bottom of his pelvis to just before his knees. He tried to use up as much as space as he could. No one saw him there except Harvey anyway. Most of the time, if he wasn't wearing a suit, he wasn't wearing anything.

He started to hum after a while, which was usually a good sign, because it meant he'd started to zone out. It was the peak he was trying to get to, where he hummed and the blood trailed down his thighs and on to the ceramic, and the entire expanse of his upper leg was covered in red. His eyes would glaze, head loll to one side, his hand would lose its more planned action and just start hacking away unceremoniously in diagonal gashes here, there, everywhere. Finally, he'd throw the blade across the room, claw at his face in frustration and cry. Eventually the pain would pull him back to the present, out from the hazards of being too far in his own head, and he'd stop crying and lean his head against the wall and stare into space as the apathy began to set in.

It was that exact position that Harvey found him in twenty minutes later, and by that point, where Mike was sitting looked like a crime scene.

" _Fuck_!" Harvey shouted, turning on one heel and covering his mouth. He had to recover –adapt – for several seconds before turning back around to deal with the situation. He'd seen Mike in similar conditions before, but this one was somewhat worse, and it never really got easier to walk in on someone slicing open their flesh.

At the sound of Harvey's voice, Mike managed to move his head enough to look at him, then it rolled back down and to the side again. His eyes were open, looking across toward the shower but not necessarily seeing. Harvey knelt in front of him, put his hand under his chin and moved his head. Maybe even more disturbing than the blood was just how colorless his eyes were, how glassy, how unfocused, how they were already so much more dead than alive, even then. It looked like he'd given up, but really, the fact that Mike was still bothering to make himself bleed meant he was making a somewhat valiant attempt to keep fighting.

It just didn't mean that he was winning.

Harvey was still mumbling expletives when he put a cool, damp towel over Mike's thighs and wiped the blood away, though most of it had dried and stained. Harvey knew it had to hurt – a lot – to aggravate recent wounds like that, but he considered for a moment that maybe that's what Mike had been counting on, because he didn't flinch.

Mike, though still somewhat entranced, noticed that Harvey looked concerned. More concerned than Mike had seen him in the past and about as concerned as he'd see him in the future (there was a cap on the scale of Harvey's concern, and this probably maxed it out). He started to shiver.

"I t-t-told you, Harvey."

Harvey glanced up at the both the sound of Mike's voice and the sudden shaking that he attributed to the fact that he was covering him in cold water. He ignored him in favor of turning on the shower until the water ran comfortably warm.

"What did you tell me, Mike?" Harvey asked, only because Mike seemed to still be waiting for a reply. He put his arms under his shoulders and pulled him up.

"Pain is relative."

"Okay," Harvey acknowledged him but focused more on getting him under the spray of water to warm him up. He tried to hold him, but the water made his skin slick, and Mike's legs were buckling. Harvey was forced to lower him to the floor of the shower, and watch him curl into a ball, almost oblivious to the water rushing around him.

"Aren't you going to _ask_ what it's relative to?"

When Harvey realized he wasn't going to get Mike to stand just yet, he sat across from him just outside of the shower, left the glass door open so he could lean in far enough to keep wiping the water from his face and eyes.

"What is pain relative to, Mike?" Harvey took the bait to appease him, and because Mike's voice sounded so far away, he probably wouldn't walk away from the situation with any kind of lucid recollection of his questions or Harvey's answers.

"You. My mind."

Mike was so calm in the aftermath of his brutal misadventures with a razor blade that it actually made Harvey significantly uncomfortable. The fact that he was curled up on his side in the shower, talking vacantly and almost philosophically about pain and how cutting himself open compared, or didn't compare, to being with Harvey or dealing with his mind – both of those overbearing in their own way – wasn't helping to make Harvey feel any better. He'd never been there before, so he was at a loss as to understand it, let alone fix it.

"Let's get out of the shower, Mike," Harvey suggested, when he noticed the water was cooling. He stood up to accelerate the process.

"No." came the reply from way down on the floor, a battered voice that sounded tragically young and lightyears away from the actual moment they were in. "No." Mike said again, and then he picked up where he'd left off. "Relative to you, no pain. Relative to my mind, no pain."

Mike knew by that point that _no_ was hollow and lacked any kind of compelling weight. Which might be why he said it so softly, so unconvincingly, because why waste his breath on a request that would be ignored? Harvey reached down and gripped his arm, which was difficult, but he did it, pulled Mike up almost entirely by it alone, eliciting a cry that wasn't an unexpected reaction to pain not caused by himself; pain he had no forewarning of and therefore no preparation for.

Harvey dragged him from the shower and wrapped a towel around his shoulders. Mike glared back at him, eyes suddenly ablaze with activity and emotion, and what looked like anger and sadness and fear was very poorly disguised as hate.

"I asked you to stand up more than once, Mike," Harvey said quietly, because he knew that those emotions stemmed from much earlier problems but that the most recent reason for the glare was Harvey's use of force, which, if Mike was in the mood to pick a fight, might have argued was gratuitous, always premature, and usually Harvey's immediate means of negotiating when verbal orders failed. In other words, Mike thought it was a flagrant misuse of his strength, and if Mike had in fact laid there for an hour or so, might have been warranted. But that wasn't usually the case; usually Harvey warned him once and then jumped to strong-arming him into compliance. Which was efficient, but cruel. Mike also thought he could _make a pretty good case_ about this, but he lacked the will to play the game at the moment. It was really just another testament to how inconvenient his mind was; how it refused to stop processing and planning even at the most inopportune times. It got him into trouble more than it got him out of it.

"I said no more than once, too," was a lot easier to say, though Mike had the sudden feeling that maybe that was enough to start a fight all on its own.

Harvey didn't answer, busied himself with drying Mike off and physically dressing him since Mike seemed completely unable to do so himself, still enveloped in a stupor of cutting-induced apathy.

"But you never hear me when I say that." he continued, arm going limp after Harvey pushed it through the sleeve of a shirt.

"Okay, Mike, let's go." Harvey announced, dismissing his words again. He put his arm around his waist and this time Mike cooperated, walked on his own accord to the bed, where he mimicked his position in the shower and Harvey covered him with the blankets. Mike had the unfortunate and inexplicable compulsion to beg him to stay, but didn't need to act on it when Harvey climbed in beside him and wrapped his arm around his chest.

"Mike, if you curl up any tighter, you're going to disappear," Harvey said. He made a half-hearted effort to unfold him.

"Comfortable."

"All right," Harvey sighed. The kid was proving to be more difficult than any case he could remember from back in his prosecution days. Harvey struggled daily with whether or not Mike was worth it.

They lied there, for maybe an hour – time was fluid, really, at least to Mike – and then it started. Harvey expected it; intentionally stayed awake because of it.

Crying.

It started quickly, suddenly, almost from nowhere, almost without a cause, though Harvey knew it absolutely had one – it had many causes. From what little Harvey understood about cutting, he decided that the endorphins and the apathy had probably worn off – because they were always so short-lived – and Mike was left with the same pain he'd started with, only now it was intensified by feelings of shame and regret and, of course, the few dozen wounds on his legs.

His cries were unyielding and morose, creating shocks that sent him writhing and jamming his face into a pillow to muffle the sound of his own sobs. Harvey held him through it, one arm around his shoulders, one around his waist, and a consistent _shhhh_ into his ear. Mike fought it, like he'd done in the past, but eventually he settled into it, and his cries died down, slowly, until he was merely sniffling – a huge victory, really – and then he was rolling over, burying his face into Harvey's chest instead of the pillow, clawing at his shirt like it might somehow allow him to get closer.

It was ironic, really, and cruelly so; another subset of Mike's life that only allowed him to _get close,_ no matter what he did, or how he tried to plaster himself to Harvey's chest, there was just a physical, molecular limit to how close you can get to another person. At some point you just stop. Matter stops you. Gravity stops you. Harvey would try to pull him against him to fool him into thinking he was making more progress, but Mike would just sniff and sigh and be forced to settle for getting close.

Which was all he ever did, really, with work and especially with Harvey. Harvey, who was stroking his hair, and Mike wondered, for a second, if he might say _it._ Though Mike had nothing he wanted at the moment, and there were no deadlines to meet, and no files to be looked over, and there was not much that Harvey hadn't already taken from him, he still wondered. If he might say it. Just maybe. Just because Mike needed to hear it, even if it was a lie. Just because if Harvey _did_ say it, when he really could expect nothing from Mike in return – except this helpless, fetal, crying heap – then maybe Mike _would_ believe him. And maybe, if he believed him, then despite what Harvey said and what Harvey did, it would all be okay. It would all be worth it. Getting through life would be worth it.

Mike stopped sniffling, his breath still, face pressed – if not practically cemented – into the corner of Harvey's neck, arms holding on so tight it was like he already knew his mind was trying to pry him off, pushing him to the edge, luring him closer to madness, closer to overdosing one week at a time, forcing his hands to slip, but he refused, digging his nails in for grip.

Harvey didn't complain.

Mike waited, hope flaming out with every passing second.

And Harvey didn't say anything at all.

.

.

.

.

When Harvey slammed on the bathroom door, Mike thought it might fall right off the hinges. He was up off the floor in a fraction of a second, clawing the tears from his eyes and shutting off the running water. He stood there for a moment, watching the door and shaking.

He hated this. He didn't walk around scared all the time. That wasn't him, it wasn't who he was. He was strong in other aspects of his life. He didn't always flinch, didn't always think so low of himself. He was the best in the bullpen and he was king in the courtroom.

But in Harvey's bathroom, he was terrified.

"Open the fucking door, Mike," Harvey called from the other side.

Mike stared a little longer, weighing his options, which were, frankly, none. The longer he stalled, the more pissed Harvey's voice got.

"I swear to God, Mike, I'll kick the door in and have it replaced by tomorrow morning."

Mike didn't know if Harvey would actually do it, but he didn't put it past him, and he knew he had the money to make it look like it'd never happened. He took a deep breath, flipped the lock, and opened the door.

He half expected to be shoved up against the wall, since that was becoming one of Harvey's favorite pastimes (along with hair carding and lying and occasionally walking past his cubicle without acknowledging his existence), but instead, Harvey just stood and looked at him.

"Come here," he said finally, waving Mike over.

Mike obliged, but kept his gaze down on his feet.

"Do you love me?" Harvey asked, putting a hand on either side of Mike's face and running it through his hair.

Mike looked up, a little frantic, a little offended. He couldn't tell if Harvey was messing with him or if he actually doubted it, and the idea that it might be the latter absolutely killed him.

Harvey reached out, put his hand behind the waistband of Mike's jeans and pulled him close. He shoved his hand deeper. Mike put his own hand up and tried to pushed against his chest.

"Mm-mm," Harvey scolded, pushing his arms down and pinning him against him. "Don't."

Mike stilled and pressed his face against his chest. Harvey was stroking him now, hard and rough, and Mike wished for once that his body wouldn't betray him, but it did; it always did.

"Well?" Harvey asked. "Do you?"

"What? Of _course_!" Mike said, strained, peeking up. Of course he loved him. How didn't understand how Harvey could even think otherwise. Either he was blind and deaf and completely oblivious, or this was a game he was playing to pay Mike back for doubting him earlier.

Harvey stilled his hand, leaving Mike in lurch. "Prove it," he said.

"What?"

"Prove you love me."

Mike looked at him, mouth slightly open, then lowered his head again. He was so confused. He was sure he proved that he loved him every day. He told him every night, sometimes several times, and often to no response. He did whatever Harvey wanted, whenever, and he endured all of his words and his criticisms and did so almost always without resistance. He was at a loss as to how that might go somehow unnoticed, or misinterpreted as anything except pure, blind, unconditional love. But maybe he'd been doing it wrong all along.

"Harvey…"

"Is this what you do now?" Harvey interrupted him and wiped away an area by Mike's eye that was still moist. He tilted his chin up with two fingers, then nodded into the bathroom and smirked. "You lose an argument, so you go in the bathroom and cry?"

"No," Mike said defensively. That wasn't what happened. Of course, when Harvey put it like that, it sure sounded pathetic. "I didn't—"

"You didn't get the last word so you went in the bathroom and cried."

"No," Mike shook his head in frustration.

"What happens if you don't get a client to settle, Mike? You give up, you cry over it? What happens in court when—"

"I wouldn't do it in _court_ , Harvey!"

"You shouldn't do it _at all, Mike."_

Mike fell silent and gave up on explaining the difference between being at work or in court – where he felt safe, confident, in his element – and being at home, where he felt insecure, nervous, and like he didn't measure up. He hated conflict and he'd rather be wrong than get in a fight trying to be right.

"Now," Harvey said, pulling his hand out of Mike's jeans and grabbing his wrist. "If you love me," he pushed Mike's hand down to his belt. "Prove it."

When Mike pulled his hand away and hesitated, Harvey put it back again and held it there.

"Otherwise," he continued. "I want you to get your ass back in the living room and finish those briefs. And then tomorrow we call this whole thing off."

"Okayokay _okay,"_ Mike said, caving, eyes watering. "Just don't— _don't_ call it off, please."

"Then make a decision, Mike," Harvey sounded bored and irritated. "I don't have all night."

The fact that Mike didn't have anyone else didn't mean he wanted anyone else. He wasn't entirely used to this side of Harvey yet, although he was getting there. The occasions were becoming more frequent, more routine. Mike's moods were taking a gradual but steady turn for the perpetually despondent. His cutting was less experimental and more habitual. Cocaine was waiting not far down the line. It was all coming together in order fall apart. But he didn't know that yet, and he loved Harvey, and Harvey knew he did, and Mike didn't want him to end it. He wasn't stupid enough to believe things would change overnight or that the status quo didn't seem like a terribly ominous precursor of the future, but he hoped things might change and he wanted to be there if they did. Beyond that, Mike never had anyone stick around as long as Harvey already had and while his gut told him that love wasn't supposed to hurt this much, experience didn't tell him differently. So when Harvey counted down, he gave in.

"Five, four, three…"

—and Mike hit his knees.

 

*


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BLANKET TRIGGER WARNING for entire story, for: drug use, major character death, self-harm, suicide, dubcon*/non-con, coercion, verbal/emotional abuse*, language.
> 
> *especially in this chapter

*

The emergency room didn't seem to stop for anything; not even death, perhaps least of all that. Activity carried on in chaotic rhythm as Harvey stood, hands in pockets, over Mike, afraid to touch him lest he turn out to be brittle China or sand or dust.

He couldn't make anything worse – the worst had already happened. But he still thought to leave well enough alone.

Freeman's company had been mildly sympathetic in a way that only someone decent, with innate qualities of humanity, could be in such a situation, given all of the history. It was also fleeting – he was gone in minutes and his words were all to indicate he'd ever walked in there in the first place.

_Enough cocaine in his system to kill a few horses._

They lingered around for a while even in his absence; sat thick on the air and on Harvey's skin like drying concrete, full not of blame or even contempt, but of basic fact and apology and resignation.

_He never had a chance._

But he had, Harvey knew, he'd had a lot of chances. All Mike had were  _chances;_ one after another, in unyielding sequence and against odds, against luck. They'd just run out. You tempt fate for so long and sooner or later this happens.

Standing there, everything was adding up. All of the things Harvey had turned a blind eye toward were flooding back to his conscience. Suddenly none of it seemed so trivial anymore. Everything had been a beacon, a red flag, a serious warning for what was to come; for the very moment he was in. And all of the past excuses and reasons and explanations he'd given himself for doing whatever he'd done or for not doing what he hadn't done, echoed back over and over and there was nothing he could do to keep it all from sounding and being grievously inadequate.

There were nurses and techs scurrying around, more and more by the second, it seemed, and it drew Harvey slowly from his thoughts. It reminded him that he couldn't stay there forever. It reminded him that standing there wasn't going to bring Mike back. In fact, the more time that passed, the colder and harder and deader he got.

But Harvey still couldn't bring himself to leave just yet, and he stopped trying to figure out why after about five seconds. He took tentative steps toward the stretcher instead. He pulled a hand out of his pocket and reached to place it on Mike's face – pausing just before he made contact. He looked at a nurse, as if for permission. They nodded solemnly. His hand fell softly, fingers falling over Mike's nose, landing on his cheekbone, sliding down his face to his jaw.

Harvey remembered standing in a room in the ICU once, when Mike was in a coma, and being afraid to touch him. He'd done it once, the day before, and his skin had been much too cold and dehydrated, and his bones way too prominent. So he'd decided that he wouldn't do it again after that, and he didn't.

This time was different though; it was the last. Mike wasn't waking up after this. He wasn't going to cough up a trach tube and struggle to remember his name, let alone books or laws or the semantics of Sarbanes-Oxley or anything else. He wasn't going home in a few days to curl up in Harvey's bed under the covers and cry or laugh and vie for recovery of the two-steps-forward-ten-steps-back variety. This time he was getting the lines pulled from his arms, the electrodes peeled off his chest, the sheets tugged from beneath him. And he was going to the morgue.

So Harvey had to touch him. He wouldn't get the chance again and he had to take it while it was still there. He wasn't sure why – why he was so suddenly compelled to do so. It wasn't love – not the traditional kind, anyway – although it wasn't obligation, either. He tried to find a more fitting reason between the two, later on, but it was impossible and it only left him with a headache.

His fingers fell lower, down Mike's jaw and toward his neck, pressed a little harder – and then stopped. It was different than the time in the ICU, when he'd first deemed it so disturbing. It was  _worse._ Then, Mike had been cold, pale, thin. Now he was none of that. He wasn't cold or warm; he was  _room temperature,_ the way only a dead body is while all the heat of life is slowly draining out of it. And he wasn't pale, not really, like someone who was only sick or sleeping, but pale in the way that erased all signs of blood running through him, and he was tinted  _blue._ And thin, Harvey noticed, when his fingers brushed his jaw, was too blasé a description for it. Mike wasn't thin; he'd passed thin weeks ago. His jaw was razor sharp, his face gaunt, his shoulders grossly prominent, his collarbones jutting, his ribs countable, stomach dipping. He was  _emaciated._ And somehow, Harvey hadn't picked up on any of it until now.

Everyone at the firm was always buzzing with concern—

Donna:  _Why is Mike so skinny? Does he eat? Maybe you should get him to eat. I never see him eat, Harvey. He looks awful. He looks exhausted. Why don't you send him home early? Why don't you give him a day off?_

Louis: _Hey, Harvey, Mike's asleep at his desk again. I'd give him a case but I don't think he'd stop looking over his shoulder long enough to take it. Anyway, I'm going to go pour water on his head unless—_

Jessica: _Harvey, I don't pay the kid to take naps on your couch._

—and he was always shooting them down.

_He's fine, Donna. He eats enough. I can't force him. He looks fine. That's just how he looks. He can't go home until he finishes the Stanley briefs. I gave him a day off, it was called Saturday._

_Get out of my office, Louis. I don't care. No, don't, don't touch him._

_You don't pay him at all, Jessica, I pay him. And he's not taking a nap—MIKE! WAKE UP!_

If it was guilt, he didn't know. If it was nonchalance, he didn't know. If he thought everyone was overreacting, he didn't know. In retrospect, their concern looked suddenly warranted, reasonable, understandable, and he looked more and more like the guy standing on sideline, doing a lot of nothing, while they waited for him to jump in and save the game.

Harvey realized he hadn't breathed for nearly a full minute, so he exhaled slowly, brought his fingers up to Mike's mouth. It was open, only a little, and he thought about how he'd tried to force air into him earlier, when he'd first found him. He thought about how futile it had been. But he'd  _tried_ so that meant—

No, it didn't mean anything. A loss was a loss. Winning was only a win if it lasted; vague, intermittent, fading bits of success didn't count. He'd lectured Mike on the very concept; of what was considered winning and what wasn't.

The thought made Harvey forget to breathe again, briefly, and the whole scene – taking breaths, covering Mike's mouth with his fingers – lured him slowly back to the door of the past and then sucked him through it.

.

* * *

.

One thing Mike did too much of was talk. At work it was fine, endearing even. It won cases, it closed clients, was impressive and generally helpful. At home he just sounded painfully young and naïve, had too many questions, and sounded invariably more invested in Harvey than Harvey was in him, and frankly, it all just had to stop.

The more time that went on, the more Mike's voice and words were laced with a bitter, resentful edge, and the more Harvey decided he was tired of hearing about the injustices of their relationship, liked he'd ever asked for it at all. Because he hadn't – he'd been stuck with it. It was a mistake with formidable consequences; a professional investment turned personal, a one-night stand turned unhealthy powertrip. Harvey had been looking for a way out ever since, though occasionally less fervently, but either way, Mike was a liability.

So was his damn mouth.

It was Tuesday and he wouldn't shut up about work or about Trevor and something about how he was supposed to hook him up with coke and the only reason he was even talking about the latter aloud in front of Harvey was because it was common knowledge by now and he was jonesing hard. He was jumpy, jittery; he needed a fix. Harvey knew this and as a preemptive measure, had taken his phone and was intentionally keeping him stashed away from Trevor and from all of his vices and influence. He was in the kitchen playing Switzerland to all of Mike's complaining until it finally started to get to him.

"I don't think you get it, Mike," he announced, walking to meet him in the living room. "You're not going anywhere, all right?"

Mike looked up at him from where he was slumped over on the couch, elbows on his thighs. "I don't think you know how bad I need it, Harvey!" he shouted, holding up a trembling hand as evidence.

"I don't care how bad you need it. I care how much  _you're not getting it."_

He turned around toward the kitchen again. Mike fell apart behind him, muttering  _fuckfuckfuckfuuuck,_ sweated and trembled and stood up to pace. He didn't know for sure how long it'd been since he'd last snorted, but he could tell it was too long.

"Please, Harvey, please," he begged, striding up to the counter.  _"Pleasepleasepleaseplease."_

Harvey ignored him, didn't even validate his pleas by looking up, and it only seemed to fuel the fire. Mike slammed the counter with his fist; Harvey's ambivalence toward his distress hurt so much worse than his revenge.

"Fine!" he snapped. "Fuck you, Harvey, I hate you! I'm gonna tell  _everyone_  what you do!"

Harvey's jaw clenched. He closed his eyes but his ability to deal with any more of Mike's drama had passed. He rounded the counter again.

" _Really,_  Mike?" he cocked his head. "What are you going to tell them? That I wouldn't let you leave to go score?"

"Yes!" Mike screamed, pointing in accusation. And then, a little softer, " _No!_  You know I'm not talking about this!"

Harvey knocked his hand down, hard. "Before you point fingers, Mike, make sure your hands don't have cocaine on them."

Mike hung his head briefly, eyes stinging with tears. He brought a shaky hand up to wipe at them, and then looked up again. He wasn't angry anymore, well, maybe a little, but mostly he was sad, scared, hurt, wounded. His heart raced with anticipation, with the need to do as much coke as necessary to stop feeling that way. Sobriety was sneaking back in and it tasted just as bitter as he remembered it; reality settling down him like the black, suffocating cloud of depression it was.

"I—I'm not  _weak,_  Harvey," he said, though his words betrayed him, squeaked and cracked and made him sound nothing but. The stronger he tried to sound, the less he did, the more he cried. It was a vicious cycle. "I'm  _not_  weak, I'm  _not_ , I just…"

"Hey," Harvey reached out for his arm and tugged him closer. "I didn't say you were weak."

"I know, but," Mike looked up timidly. "That's how I feel when I'm with you."

Harvey pulled him into a hug, draped his arms over his shoulders, and pressed his nose into his hair. He sighed and held him like that for a long time, considering just how in over his head he was; that they both were.

"You need endorphins," he said finally, quietly, half-statement, half-question. He ran his hands down the frail outline of Mike's hips.

Mike nodded against his chest and Harvey tightened his grip around his lower back. He lifted him up off the floor, pulling his legs around his waist and carrying him toward the bed. He made a mental note of just how easy it was to lift Mike – too easy, maybe, like sawdust outweighed him – but it fell from the forefront of thought as soon as he busied himself with laying him down and stripping off their clothes.

The thought returned to him briefly as he went about kissing Mike; his mouth, his neck, his chest, his hips. He was thin and occasionally seemed excessively so, but, Harvey defended, surely that's just the way he was. Surely it was easier than accepting that Mike's wellbeing was in fact in his hands and that he was failing miserably at the job.

But when had it become his job to make sure Mike was eating? When had it become his job to make sure Mike wasn't so miserable that he had no appetite or that he hated himself so much the thought of food made him feel like throwing up?

Harvey had time to entertain questions like that, but not enough to answer them. Mike was squirming underneath him and running off at the mouth again and  _Jesus Christ,_ it was like he had an I.V. drip of Red Bull in his system. If Harvey didn't have such an anti-drug policy, he probably would've been tempted to let the kid do a few lines just so he'd chill out and be quiet.

"I told him we were low on Sunday, I told him, I said, 'Trevor, we're gonna need more,' and he promised, promised—ah,  _ahh_ —that he'd take care of it and then I called—uhh,  _God_ —and he doesn't pick up. Anyway, hey, I was thinking about what you told the client today and there was a—"

"Mike…" Harvey warned, dragging his tongue up his neck toward his ear. "Shhh."

Mike shifted underneath him, quiet for a second or two, but picked up right where he left off.

"There was a—page thirty-three, and I think, if I could just remember the—"

His words were a million miles an hour. It was actually difficult to tell if it was his brain in overdrive, a serious withdrawal from cocaine, or if he was just really fucking nervous.

Either way, Harvey was sick of it and he didn't understand how Mike managed to tread on such a thin line between turning him on and pissing him the hell off.

"Mike," he said, a little sharper. "Shut up."

He didn't want a response. Just silence, obedience, passivity; the usual.

"Okay,  _but_ —" was definitely not any of those things. He looked down sternly, put his fingers on Mike's mouth, gently at first, just grazing, following the curve of his lips down to his jaw and then back, wondering how someone so small could make so much fucking noise, ask so many fucking questions, demand so many fucking answers, have such a fucking attitude. He ran his whole hand up next, ghosting over the part of Mike's mouth that was ever-so-slightly open, in the way that indicated recent speech and threatened more of it at any moment. It was so tempting. It was so…tempting…to just…

"Harvey…" Mike's voice was back, as promised, soft but urgent, like he couldn't handle the suspense any longer. And Harvey couldn't handle making him wait for it almost as much as he couldn't stand the talking. So he clamped his hand down over Mike's mouth, hard, flattening his palm and fingers around either side, sealing off any escape route for sound.

Mike's eyes widened at the sudden pressure, the grip. He shook his head and Harvey's hand moved with it. He breathed hard and fast through his nose, trying to compensate for the air he wasn't getting through his mouth. When he tried to speak, it came out a muffled, distorted whimper. But Harvey could deal with that, could deal with a million whimpers, as long as it wasn't preceded by ridiculous tangents on people and ethics and feelings and drugs and  _blah blah blah._  It was too much passion for Harvey to deal with; too many things that Mike cared about that Harvey didn't give a shit about. It was too much energy; too much  _life._

He didn't think too much about how quickly that all seemed to be fading.

 

*

 


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I tried to quote Rain Man, but I can't remember it. I can't remember shit anymore, Harvey."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BLANKET TRIGGER WARNING for entire story, for: drug use, major character death, self-harm, suicide, dubcon/non-con, coercion, verbal/emotional abuse, language.
> 
> Lyrics in this are from All I Know by Art Garfunkel.

*

_I bruise you, you bruise me  
_ _We both bruise too easily, too easily  
_ _To let it show  
_ _All my plans have fallen through  
_ _All my plans depend on you, depend on you  
_ _To help them grow_

 

*

 

There was a plastic bag on the table in front of Harvey and it didn't matter where it came from, didn't matter if he directed Ray to a part of town he otherwise didn't cross into, didn't matter if he rolled down the window and stuffed a wad of cash into a stranger's hands.

All that really mattered was that he was home now, scotch in one hand, credit card in the other, staring down the bag and all of its perfect, pearlescent whiteness as if it might solve all of his problems if he simply looked at it long enough, or if it might just disappear altogether.

If only.

But it didn't didn't disappear, didn't evaporate, stayed sitting before him, looking so innocent and so ominous all at once, and it was as real and as tangible as Mike was dead.

" _You should try it, Harvey."_

" _What?"_

" _The coke," Mike motioned to the table. "It might make you less of a dick."_

His voice had been so young, _so young,_ so full of defiance, bitterness, of scorned, ruined youth and scrambled, faltering intelligence. Flashing back and hearing it was like a punch to Harvey's stomach – he nearly doubled over and dropped his scotch from the sheer theoretical force.

Mike had been angry that night; hopeless, resentful – but he'd still loved. It was the only consistent thing the kid ever did, really. The smoking and cutting and drinking and snorting coke and falling into the quicksand trenches of morbid depression had become a pattern, but there were arbitrary periods of sobriety and overdose that riddled it, and the only thing that never changed was that he  _loved._ It was the one thing that never faltered or fluctuated even during the worst of his struggle. It was always there, in the same unyielding capacity that only someone like Mike could retain, behind blue eyes and naivety and often beneath the faint blur of tears or haze of rejection or harsh words of animosity. Still it didn't waver. Whether he was sober or sleeping or working or getting high, he loved Harvey, with every part of himself. At first it was with passion, enthusiasm, childlike optimism and energy and eyes-lighting-up and a revving heartbeat. Then it was with dejection, despair, out of fear, with narrowed, grey eyes and a revving heartbeat, though less from butterflies and more from cocaine. He was manufacturing the rush of love to cover up the fallout of the same thing.

Harvey didn't want to think about the times Mike did that; didn't want to get drawn into bitter recall, but it was hard not to.

.

* * *

.

Harvey took cautious steps toward Mike. He was slouched over the table, furiously cutting a line, licking his lips, smearing leftover powder on the inside of his gum, so completely desperate to get it into his system that his whole body shook, and everything about him screamed _addict._

He wore it well, Harvey realized. The messy hair, the three-day-old jeans, the missing shirt, the red-rimmed eyes, the devastatingly-vacant look that no one would ever, ever have unless they were nine days, six hours, one balcony and two syringes away from death.

And somehow, it just fit.

Harvey sat beside him. He was too exhausted to fight him that night; too exasperated to wrestle or yell or lecture. He'd tried to help him, tried to pull him from the third floor to the penthouse, but Mike had failed and fallen, hard and fast. Maybe Harvey was never meant to give him that chance – to chance to channel all of that overwhelming information into something good, something that required enough mental energy that he stood a chance of staying sane. Maybe it wasn't his place; maybe Mike being a cocaine addict had been in the cards all along.

Harvey didn't believe anything happened for a reason, but Responsibility was a room with his name on the door and thinking that way helped him inch closer to getting the fuck out of that room.

.

* * *

.

_Responsibility._

The word made him sick. It made him bring the tumbler to his mouth and tilt it back and finish off all the scotch in one hard, painful swallow, and it burned all the way down, and he  _took_  it, because he thought he deserved it.

He'd tried to move on, the way Jessica told him to; the way she ordered him to. And by day, it was easy. He put on his suit and fell right back into pre-Mike cadence and his winning ratio was nearly unrivaled and his billables were better than Louis'. His track record was stellar, perhaps, better than it'd ever been. But it wasn't the days that were the problem.

It was the nights.

Nights came too fast and passed too slow. It tended to feel that way, at least, when he couldn't sleep. Mike's memory taunted him, jarred him awake whenever he dozed off, and the sleep debt alone should've been affecting his performance at work, and he knew it would soon. It would all catch up with him at some point.

The bag on the table was two-fingers long, twice as thick, packed tight with cocaine, nearly  _glinted_  under the recessed lighting, and it was luring him, tempting him, challenging him. He put a finger on his temple and he didn't know when he became this weak, or this desperate, and he started thinking again and it stalled him momentarily.

His mind shuffled through the haze of mild drunkenness and the present just…slipped away.

.

* * *

.

Mike's high came on fast, seconds after he sat up, sucking in through his nose until he absolutely needed to exhale, until it was no longer choice but necessity. He looked at Harvey and laughed, and Harvey thought this  _had_  to be rock bottom. This had to be worse than the time he'd pushed past Trevor and found Mike in the bathroom. It had to be worst than all of the times before. Mike wasn't crying, wasn't shouting; was  _laughing,_  and if that  _wasn't_  his rock bottom, Harvey wasn't sure what was.

He had this compulsion to reach out and stop him. The same compulsion that drove him to do so all of the other times: because he hated drugs in general, because they were destroying Mike, because it angered him that Mike seemed to be doing it strictly to spite him. Mike had argued once that the drug was not what was destroying him but Harvey had heard none of it. And sitting there, he was too tired and slightly too mesmerized to intervene just yet.

" _Fuck, Harvey,"_  Mike breathed, inhaling again. His head was swimming now, exploding with dopamine, blazing a path for apathy in its wake, and it felt so good, and it felt like nothing at all, and the only thing it  _didn't_  feel like was pain. "It's so good."

Harvey bit his lip and winced, watched as Mike ran his hands over his face again and again. Mike's skin felt like it was alive; hot and prickly, like all the hair on his body was standing up. When he rubbed his face, it felt like it was sloughing off into his hands. It didn't alarm him the way it should have. He was used to the feeling, he knew it would pass, and the benefit of being not only numbed to pain – both physical and emotional – but practically _immune_  to it, was totally worth the rest.

"Mike…" Harvey said, voice strained, almost broken, like he was watching the curer of cancer light himself on fire. Such a waste. But he still didn't act, didn't respond, didn't reach out and pull Mike up by his shoulder when he bent over to draw more up his nose. All it would do was start a fight. Mike would struggle and curse and cry and then guilt trip him for days afterward. As it was, Harvey wasn't actively doing anything wrong. Mike was the one self-destructing - this was on him; this was  _his_  fault.

Sometimes Mike thought that Harvey could justify just about anything: a kidnapping, a bank heist, a multi-million dollar nationwide fiscal scandal – anything. If that was the case, then whatever Harvey was doing to him seemed small in comparison. In hindsight things looked so glaringly wrong, but at the time, it was easy to see how Mike slipped through the cracks; how he held it together remarkably well enough that no one investigated until it was far too late.

He rubbed his nose. It felt off into his fingers. It felt like raw, sticky cartilage. He wrinkled it in disgust and then realized it was back on his face. He turned to look at Harvey, who looked concerned – mildly so – and more disturbed and inconvenienced than anything else. The lighting in Mike's apartment was shit, but it lit up Harvey's face just right, and he looked  _perfect_ , Mike realized, like always, no matter where he was or what he was doing, even if he was there, doing nothing at all. He licked his finger and rolled it across the narrow stretch of cocaine on the table, then turned and surged toward Harvey.

He kissed him, hard and desperate, like he was his only remaining connection to life at all anymore, like his own lungs weren't enough; crawled into his lap and leaned against him.

Harvey pushed him back a little, looked into his eyes, but Mike's pupils were so dilated, and his lids twitched, and he couldn't hold the gaze for any length of time. Harvey didn't look like the enemy right then. Mike wasn't angry with him, wasn't afraid of him, wasn't sad because of him. Everything was fine, for a moment, though Mike knew it wouldn't last. His moments of  _fine_ never lasted long anymore; his body had adapted. Of course, he wasn't exactly sure what was waiting for him once it passed, but he had a vague recollection that it wasn't anything good, that he needed to soak up this feeling while he had the chance because it would be gone soon and replaced with something awful.

" _It's so good,"_ he repeated, like it was the first time he'd ever said it, the words new and shiny on his lips, like they explained everything, made everything okay.  _"So good."_  He licked the cocaine off his finger and then framed Harvey's face with his hands. "Will you just…please…"

"Please what, Mike?"

"Just,  _unnh,"_  Mike burrowed his face in Harvey's neck and then snapped it up again. The rush was simmering down; plateauing. It frustrated him. The high was in like a lion, out the exact same way; the half-life shorter than ever, an enraging ninety seconds at best. And his supply was low. When he came down from it completely, he would be shit out of luck because Trevor was out of town for three days and Harvey kept him on too tight of a leash for him to sneak off long enough to get it himself. "Will you just…try…I feel like I'm floating. Don't you want to feel like you're floating?"

"No," Harvey said sternly. "You're not making any sense, Mike."

"If you're…if you're not gonna do it, Harvey, and you're not gonna help me," Mike sat back in his lap and pouted. "Then I want you to leave."

Harvey stared for a second and then grabbed Mike's hips and tried to move him. He called his bluff every time and Mike hated it.

"No!" he panicked, beared down, clutched Harvey's shirt in his fingers. "No, don't, please. I was just…don't leave,  _please_  don't."

The crash was worse than ever that night. Mike begged for five solid minutes for Harvey to stay, and Harvey complied and held him while he fell apart, while he slammed face-first back into reality with a violent jerk. He soaked Harvey's shirt with tears as it all hit him; the black and grey, colorless, overbearing world of trying to survive beneath depression and Harvey's despotism. His skull hurt. His skin hurt. His heart hurt.

Harvey needed to get up and get on with his life but Mike, considering how skinny he was, was doing an impressive job of keeping him pinned to the couch.

"I love you," he was saying – or sobbing – and Harvey thought _, Shit._  "I love you so much, Harvey, I love you more than anything in the world. I'm sorry I got high, I'm sorry I  _am_  high, kind of, I don't know, I feel like shit," he was rambling, confused and incessant. "I feel like I'm in a tunnel."

"I thought you felt like you were floating?" Harvey looked up at him, studying him, watching for signs that the somber, hopeless, pitifully broken Mike he was used to seeing was back or if he was still somewhere deep inside his mind, skipping around in Cocaineland, holding his own nose.

"I  _did,"_  Mike explained, whispering now, almost secretive. He stroked Harvey's jaw like it was a rare fossil, and he was delicately brushing sand off of it. "But now I'm in a tunnel. And there's no light, Harvey, there's nothing, it's just black."

Harvey nodded to appease him, but Mike's voice broke. He was frantic again; all emotion and hands and run-on sentences.

"I'm in the tunnel and I love you and you don't love me.  _You don't love me at all,"_ Mike sobbed and pounded his forehead against Harvey's ribs in distress. Harvey winced but stayed still. "Why? What do I have to do?" He grinded down into Harvey's lap. "I'll do  _anything."_

Harvey's tolerance was waning; temper flaring, blood running cold at what he interpreted as desperate, obnoxious insolence. But he was better and better at control; he'd had a lot of practice. And he was still tired. He gripped Mike's hips and stilled him. The friction felt good,  _so good,_  but if Mike wanted it, or he thought he wanted it, or he initiated it, or he begged for it, then it didn't do anything for Harvey anymore. If he was so  _willing_ —well, Harvey thought he should be disgusted with himself, but he was much more indifferent about the realization than anything else.

"Mike, relax," he ordered.

Mike stopped, lingered, breathed. A sharp tingle of apprehension coursed through him, drew him that much closer to fear as the drugs wore off. His face was drenched in tears.

"I just don't want you to  _leave,"_ he whined.

"I'm still here, aren't I?" Harvey asked, tilting his head, almost to emphasize how much bullshit he'd just put up with; to silently drive into the ground that no one else would.

"Yes, but," Mike gasped. "You left before. Remember? You said we were done and you _left_  and you didn't need me anymore."

Harvey wasn't sure if he'd ever actually  _needed_  Mike –  _want_  seemed like a far more suitable word and even that seemed to be slipping to the more relevant past tense,  _wanted_  – but he didn't say it. "I took you back," he told him instead. "I took you back, Mike, didn't I?"

"Y-y-yes," Mike said, tripping dumbly over his words, like basic adverbs were now a challenge to his once encyclopedic brain.  _"But I just…"_

"Mike, hush," Harvey said. "Just breathe. You're never doing this again, okay?  _Ever."_

"It makes me want to  _die,"_  Mike blurted out, voice pitching. In his defense, he'd tried to just breathe and it didn't work out. His mind had put words on hold during his high and now they were flooding out of him like they'd been backed up for years, trapped in a queue and waiting to escape. He slipped his knees around either side of Harvey's thighs, tucked his feet under his knees, wrapped his arms around his neck; quite literally plastered himself against him. "Thinking about it, you leaving, it makes me want to die, it's the worst feeling in world, I try, I keep trying but I can't make you happy, I  _can't—"_

"Mike…" Harvey put two fingers up to Mike's mouth but the kid just talked around them.

"It's okay, though, if you don't love me," he rambled, breathless. "You don't have to, I still love you,  _everything_ —think of everything you love, Harvey, and add it all up and I love you more than all of—"

Harvey leaned forward and kissed him, rough, punishing, "Mike,  _stop_  talking."

Mike finally fell quiet, sudden, like the batteries hadn't just died but someone had snapped him open and taken them out entirely. Harvey guided his head down onto his shoulder.

"Just shut up and breathe," he told him, running his hand through his hair. "Like that. Good boy."

Mike's heartbeat thumped against his chest and Harvey could feel it pulsing between them. It was steadily slowing back to a normal rhythm. It was nearly audible and it felt strong, healthy, consistent.

Harvey didn't think it would ever actually  _stop._

_._

* * *

_._

Ray made two detours that night before driving Harvey home. The first one was to the hospital.

Harvey walked inside, looking too healthy and too well-dressed to be standing in the middle of an emergency room surveying the staff for a familiar face. The sick and injured eyed him suspiciously, like he was God or Lucifer in a pit of the feeble and uninsured.

Harvey saw him beside a counter and there was a sudden swiftness in his gait as he started to walk again.

The man turned and gave him an odd look. Not of contempt, or of welcome, but of neutrality; blankness and unfamiliarity. Months had passed, anyway.

"A lawyer walks into a hospital…" the man said dryly. He rested a charted on his inner forearm and wrote illegible notes.

"I prefer the one about the doctor," Harvey replied. "Punchline's better."

"What do you want, Specter?" Alex's voice was bored, not enthused or fazed but not necessarily angry either. He didn't look up from writing.

Harvey had to swallow what remained of his pride. When he stepped in through the doors, he wasn't in his own territory anymore. He was a foreigner, an outsider, closer to an enemy than an ally, and he had to act like it if he hoped to get any answers at all.

"I want to ask you something," he said carefully. "About Mike Ross."

Alex shot him a fleeting glare. "A little late for that, don't you think?"

Harvey ignored him. "Listen," he said, and he sounded much less arrogant, less philopolemic, than all the other times they'd spoken. "I just want you to tell me something, and I'll leave, and I'll never come back."

"I'd like nothing but that," Alex said, and then frowned. "You came up here to ask me a question? We have phones."

"And how would that go, huh? 'Dr. Freeman, Harvey Specter on line four'?"

Alex shrugged as if to say, 'touché. "Fine. Shoot."

"Okay," Harvey took a deep breath. "But I need you tell me the truth."

"As opposed to lying?" Alex said, narrowing his eyes. "I'm not a lawyer."

"Right… I'm sorry," Harvey said, ignoring the insult, but the word sorry came out painful and forced. He moved on. "Just don't sugarcoat it, is all I'm asking. If it's bad, tell me. If it's good, tell me. But don't tell me what you think I want to hear. Don't tell me it's good to spare me; don't tell me it's bad to spite me. Just tell me the truth, whatever it is; just the science. Please."

Alex looked momentarily suspicious, and then sighed. "Okay. What do you want to know?"

"I want—" Harvey hesitated. "I need to know. What it was like. For him."

"I…" Alex stared and shook his head. "I don't know. I've never overdosed on cocaine before. I can't really say."

"You can speculate."

"Why would I want to do that?"

Harvey ran a hand over his face . "Look," he said, trying to bargain. "You know this stuff. You know about overdosing and you know what drugs do. I don't."

He was starting to understand how much it sucked have to  _make a case_ in order for someone to listen to him.

Alex thought for a minute and he set down his chart, tugged at the stethoscope around his neck with a nervous finger. Harvey's face fell.

"It's bad, isn't it?"

"I don't really see why you want to do this to yourself, Specter."

"You don't even like me, Freeman," Harvey persisted, though his voice was calm; pained but amiable. "Why do you care if I do this to myself? Just tell me the goddamn truth."

"All right, look," Alex sighed. "Cocaine is a stimulant. It affects the central nervous system—"

"I know  _that,"_  Harvey interrupts. "Jesus, I'm not a complete idiot. I have Google."

"Oh, are you a doctor, now? You go to Harvard Med School  _and_  Harvard Law?"

Harvey put his hands up in apology.

"Like I was saying," Alex continued, annoyed. "It affects the central nervous system. When someone overdoses that much, it can cause respiratory failure, convulsions…"

"What happened to Mike?" Harvey looked at him expectantly.

Alex stalled. "It was months ago."

"But you remember him," Harvey said. "You liked him. You tried to help him. You remember."

"Everything," Alex deadpanned. He cleared his throat. "Convulsions first—I'm assuming he insufflated it before he injected it—then respiratory failure."

"He was awake…when he…"

"Convulsed?" Alex nodded. "Yeah. Look, cocaine is actually difficult to overdose on. Addicts build up a tolerance to it and they're able to withstand more and more of the drug. In this case, he took so much that it didn't really matter—but the way he did it… I wanted nothing more than to write 'accidental' on that paper, but there's no way he didn't know that was going to kill him. And if you're asking if he was unconscious… no, not until he stopped breathing."

Harvey flinched. "I'm asking if he suffered."

"He probably couldn't breathe for a while. Several minutes at least," Alex continued. He cursed Harvey silently for bringing up the entire ordeal and forcing to him to remember. "Probably felt like he was drowning. Yeah, I'd…say he suffered."

They stood and stared at each other for a few seconds, neither daring to say anything else. The weight of the truth settled down on Harvey's shoulders and it was so much heavier than he'd expected; it stripped him of all of the excuses he'd made, all of the sugarcoating he'd done over the past few months, all of the mitigating, the lessening, the repeated mantra in his head that he'd chanted over and over, trying so hard to convince himself that Mike had simply just…fallen asleep.

"I want his records," Harvey demanded suddenly.

Alex scoffed, "Yeah, right."

"I'm a lawyer, I need them."

"I've already told you more than I'm supposed to. I'm not putting my license on the line so you can be a masochist. That doesn't help Mike."

"Yeah, I know that," Harvey snapped, though still, his anger wasn't directed at Alex, but at himself. It seemed like they both knew that and the hostility from past months was gone. "I want the manner of death."

"Suicide." Alex shot back simply. Again, it was bitter, but it wasn't personal.

"Okay, hotshot," Harvey corrected. " _Cause_  of death. And I concede that Harvard Med beats Harvard Law. On Sundays."

Alex squinted, very faint smile on his lips, because he and Harvey had so little in common and yet—there they were—martyrs for their profession, the only real link between the bitter end of Mike's life, and after all of it, they were having a conversation, a civil one, and neither of them was shouting or calling for security, because as much as it all sucked, it was - more or less - over.

"Cause of death, asphyxiation."

Harvey looked down at the tile. Alex took a deep breath; he felt bad. He wasn't spiteful, he wasn't petty, he didn't believe in doing anything for the sake of doing it, if the outcome was pointless or upsetting. He waited patiently.

Finally, Harvey lifted his head and gave a professional nod, "Thank-you," he said, as best he could, and it sound equally as strange on his lips as the words 'please' and 'sorry' had been whenever he'd said them to Mike, which had been rare, of course.

Alex just shrugged in response, mild apology in his body language.

"If I ever need a hospital," Harvey told him, turning to leave. "I'll make sure not to come to this one."

"Thanks," Alex said. "And Specter?"

Harvey stopped briefly and looked back.

"Harvard Med beats Harvard Law.  _Every_  day."

Harvey scoffed, waved him off and headed toward the exit.

He pulled out his cell phone on the way to the car, tapped the screen, pulled up Google and typed in  _asphyxiation._  Not because he didn't know what it meant – he wasn't  _a complete idiot_  – but because he needed to see it. Deserved to see it. He scrolled down the screen; and his chest tightened with guilt, stomach twisted with unease.

_Asphyxiation, n: the condition of being deprived of oxygen; suffocation._

"Ray," he called, upon sliding into the back seat. He closed Google and dialed a number. "I need you to make another stop."

.

* * *

.

Harvey got up and refilled his scotch. The room tilted a bit and then his perspective leveled out again. He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and sat back down again. The cocaine was still staring him down from the table before him. Or maybe it was the other way around; he didn't know.

He unfolded the paper like he was opening old mail. He'd read it a thousand times. The writing never changed, words always sounded the same. The edges were rough and frayed from where he'd torn it from the notebook.

When the paramedics had rushed Mike out of his apartment, Harvey had stood there for several seconds, in shock, and when he'd looked down, the notebook was sitting by his feet. He'd torn the top page off, and, hearing the frantic voices fading down the stairs, he'd shoved it into his pocket and rushed off in time to demand a seat in the back of the ambulance.

He was pretty sure he'd threatened some kind of unlikely legal action if they didn't let him, but honestly, he was two and a half scotches in now and he had lost all ability to speak soon after leaving Mike's apartment, so he didn't really know for sure.

Mike's handwriting was messy, lazy, under-the-influence; telltale college-dropout penmanship. Harvey almost couldn't stand to look at it.

There were more than a few lines that he'd scratched through completely. Beneath, he'd explained why.

 _I tried to quote_ Rain Man _, but I can't remember it. I can't remember shit anymore, Harvey. It's cool, though, because it's like my mind has finally shut off. It's just…I don't think I can ever start it back up again. I'm not smart anymore. I'm average. But you already know that._

_I'm in that tunnel again, the one I told you about. Remember? It's so dark here, but it doesn't hurt. It doesn't feel like anything. It feels like nothing. I like nothing. Don't be mad, but, I'm going to stay here, okay?_

Upon reading the note for the thousand-and-first time, Harvey tossed it aside and immediately clawed open the bag in front of him. He realized that he wasn't weak, he wasn't desperate, but something else entirely. And he wasn't pining, either, not in any sense of the word. After all, if Mike was still alive, he'd still be a clingy, talkative pain in the ass. Dead Mike was both a lot less and lot more problematic.

What Harvey  _was,_ was guilty.  _Culpable._  Not out of choice, not because he felt like he  _should_  be, or even because he necessarily felt like he'd done some certain, particular thing wrong, but rather participated in a long, drawn out sequence of events that weren't right, either. It was a feeling that had snuck up on him from the beginning, worsened with every night, and nagged him every time he tried to close his eyes. It was pervasive and relentless and though he fought it tooth and nail, it was still eating him alive.

It was eating him alive the way bacteria eats away at skin; slow, painful, corrosive. It was a kind of burden he hadn't experience before this; the kind that sat heavy on his shoulders, like concrete, weighing him down, making his bones ache, and he was convinced that it couldn't feel any worse even if he'd shot Mike in the head himself. Morally speaking, it was getting harder and harder to tell the difference between that and what had actually happened.

For the first time, he had a problem but not the slightest idea how to fix it.

He was sitting in front of Mike's suicide note, a glass of scotch, cutting a line of cocaine with God-knows-what-else in it, he hadn't slept in seventy-two hours, and – Harvey Specter was fucking  _lost._

The first time was swift, painful, like someone was shoving needles into his brain or inhaling dry ice; it burned so bad he had no idea how Mike had ever been able to stand it. There had to be something better, but for the life of him, he couldn't think of anything. And if this was the only way, plus a little retribution, then so be it. He cringed, partly from the burn and partly because he was getting a very mild glimpse at how much pain Mike had to have been in for this to seem like an acceptable trade-off.

When Harvey straightened up the second time, sniffing hard through his nose, he could see Mike sitting on the edge of the couch a few feet away. He groaned at the pain in his head, closed his eyes briefly, and when he opened them, Mike was gone.

"It's so good, isn't it?"

"Fuck," Harvey hissed, jumping. He finished another line and noticed that Mike was on the other side of him now and looked like… _death._ Which made sense, because he  _was_ dead - a gray, decomposing testament to the not-so-glamorous side of dying young. What  _didn't_  make sense was that he was there, next to him,  _talking._

"I told you it was good. I was right, right?"

"Yeah, Mike, you were right," Harvey looked back at him with blown pupils, surveying his body; naked, pale, scarred by cuts and track marks. "I'm sorry."

Mike laughed, scornful, mocking. Harvey actually flinched.

"You're not sorry I'm dead. You're just sorry you feel like it's your fault."

"What the hell is the difference?"

Mike's bones were visible everywhere; collarbone, hips, wrists, ribs, nothing with enough flesh to fool the eye and dissuade the mind from assuming he'd been caged and deprived for a very, very long time, like a dog someone chained in the backyard all winter with food bowls a few strides out of reach. His shoulder blades were especially sharp; sickly prominent when he shrugged in response.

Harvey was annoyed. He knew what Mike was talking about now; understood what he'd meant by floating, but whatever sense of peace he'd seemed to have gotten out of it, Harvey couldn't find. And Mike was gone the next time he turned, the seat completely untouched by anyone, or anything; zero evidence at all of his hallucination.

"You shouldn't trust people, Mike." He shook his head and imagined Mike asking him  _why_  in that young, irritating, oblivious way. "Because," he explained, downing the remaining scotch. "They can hurt you."

 

*

  


_The ending always comes at last  
Endings always come too fast  
They come too fast, but they pass too slow_

_I love you  
And that's all I know_

 

*

 


	17. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He was starting to feel more and more like no matter how many times he washed his hands, he couldn't quite scrub off all of the blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I filled this story primarily for two reasons - one, I love angst, and two, I believed in the prompt. I thought it was realistic and that it was something that could happen without being too far-fetched. If they were ever in a relationship, I'd hope it would be perfect and normal, and it could be. But I also think there's this potential for it to go horribly wrong, because there's this power-struggle sort of dynamic to it that creates a really slippery slope. Harvey's tendency to be controlling and Mike's proclivity for addiction makes it easy for me to see things going bad, so it made it easier to write. 
> 
> That said, this story technically ended with Part 16, however, I'd already written this short epilogue and I think that it offers (in a slightly open-ended way) a little more closure.  
> Now for my redemption, I'm writing fluff. 
> 
> And that's a wrap, folks!
> 
> -s
> 
> \--
> 
> [See end of the story for more notes.]

 

*

 

Harvey and cocaine was a one-time thing, much like all of the people he'd slept with (aside from Mike). It was a shiny, painful, deceptive mistress and he'd spent the following morning puking the seduction right into the toilet for about two hours. There had been nothing but bile after a few minutes, but he'd continued to gag and heave and perspire – and then called in sick for the first time in nearly a decade.

"Donna? Cancel all my meetings today and reschedule Weaver for me."

"On it." Donna replied through the phone. "You okay?"

Harvey was gasping, panting almost. Even his daily workout regimen was more forgiving than that. He felt like he'd ingested arsenic. He wouldn't do it again, he swore.  _Never again._  And if the way he felt wasn't enough of an incentive not to, then the hallucination he'd had definitely was.

"I saw Mike," he admitted. He moved away from the toilet and sat back against the wall, wiping sweat off his forehead. "And I did cocaine."

"Harvey, Mike's gone."

He wrestled his gasps down to a more even pace, "Yeah, I know that, Donna." He rolled his eyes; he'd spent a solid minute sitting on his couch talking to a corpse – he was pretty sure he knew Mike was gone. Everyone seemed to tiptoe around him, solemnly reminding him of the cold, hard fact, but he was not in denial. He was very acutely aware that _dead_ was what Mike was. He knew it was irreversible and he was starting to feel more and more like no matter how many times he washed his hands, he couldn't quite scrub off all of the blood. 

There was a bitter, mildly-joking tone to his voice when he spoke next, and it was a in a slightly self-pitying way that he never spoke in to anyone except her, because he had to save face around everybody else. "Did you miss the part about the cocaine?"

The line was comfortably silent for a beat, and then Donna's voice broke in again, hushed, loyal, serious. "Do you need me?"

Harvey shuddered, which was as good as, if not better than, a resounding  _yes._  "I just need you to—"

"Cancel all your meetings and reschedule Weaver? Yeah, it's done, Harvey," her voice was soft, soothing. The compassion in it bore a metaphorical hole through him – he didn't deserve it.

Then again, he was sitting on his bathroom floor, knees to his chest, sick to his stomach from doing drugs – if the guilt didn't crush him, the irony definitely would.

.

 

Harvey never used after that – like he'd sworn he wouldn't – and, as a result, didn't see Mike again, either. If that was his rock bottom, he got a grip and found a way out. It was easier for him – he had the incentive, the support system, the will; the things Mike had lacked.

He packed up all of his shit and moved to the other side of Manhattan – the change of scenery did wonders for his conscience. He was back to sleeping in his own bed, and, more often than not, pretty comfortably.

They had the plaque on the wall changed from  _Pearson-Hardman_  to  _Pearson-Specter_ one day, and Jessica looked at him, smiled, and he smiled back; genuine, all teeth, like the previous months hadn't particularly made him much worse for wear.

She continued to hound him, albeit gently, to bring in another associate and, to appease her, he did. He hired the first Harvard douche Donna sent through the door and made a point _not_ to sleep with him – which wasn't difficult since the kid was half as hot and twice as dumb as Mike had been.

Harvey moved on like he had been told to do.

Mike Ross faded into the past and – for the most part – seemed to stay there.

Occasionally, Harvey's memory would betray him. Usually it did so during a lull in his work, if he wasn't keeping busy enough. It was a lot of noise, when it happened: a long, knock-down tirade; a varying mash-up of certain things Mike had said to – cried, or shouted at – him, playing back in a loop in a young, fearful, angry voice.

_Sometimes I can't tell if you ever really gave a fuck about me or just about what I could do for you. I don't want you to replace me. I'll do anything. I'm tapping out. Go away. Fuck you. I hate you. You treat me like shit. Fuck off. That hurts. Let go. I'm sorry. I want to die. It's the worst feeling in the world. I don't want to do this. You want me to be this perfect machine and I can't. Can you stop yelling at me now? Let go. I love you. I want to go home. It didn't used to hurt. Pain is relative. I'm not weak, Harvey. Don't leave. I love you. I love you so much. I love you more than anything in the world. I'm sorry. I love you and you don't love me. You don't love me at all._

It was brutal, but somewhat seldom. He would delve back into work and it would go away for a long time.

And every once in a while, when some kid on a bike veered in front of him outside of the firm, Harvey's heart would rev little, and he'd stop, adjust his grip on his coffee, take a deep breath and resume walking. Blonde hair, blue eyes, and youth were a trifecta he avoided at all costs, though it was a subconscious effort. He'd learned his triggers and he skirted around them whenever possible.

He finally submitted to a harsh reality, which was: he couldn't forget Mike completely and he couldn't quell the guilty entirely.

But if he tried really hard, he could  _get close._

And wasn't that the worst feeling in the world.

 

*

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The amazing ellen-grieves, who posted the prompt for this, created a beautiful fanmix for Shutting Down. It is exactly what I imagined for this story, and you can find it here: http://ellen-grieves.livejournal.com/75193.html
> 
> I have also created a movie trailer based very loosely on this story; you can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCldN6DE6s0


End file.
